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.
Sexist Ire: Persecuting Iconoclasts (and Iconoclastic Vice Characters)
“Please, sir. The hardship on the Animals is more than can be bourne. It isn’t just the murder of Doctor Dillamond. It’s this force repatriation, this—this chattelizing of free Beasts. You must get out and see the sorrow. There is talk of—there is worry that the next step will be slaughter and cannibalism. This isn’t merely youthful outage. Please, sir. This is not untrammeled emotion—what’s happening is immoral—”
“I do not listen when anyone uses the word immoral […]”
“if not immoral, then word can I use to imply wrong?”
“Try mysterious and then relax a little. The thing is, my green girlie, it is not for a girl, or a student, or a citizen to assess what is wrong. This is the job of leaders, and why we exist.”
—Elphaba and Oz, Wicked (1995)
Picking up where “Stand to Fight, then Raise Your Fist and ‘Bow’ to Duck the Imperial Boomerang” left off…
(artist: Harmony Corrupted)
Because iconoclasm invites targeted persecution by defying the status quo (what Elphaba calls “gravity“), it is invariably performed by marginalized groups or their champions; i.e., passed off as embodiments vice, mid-cryptonymy (mentioned all the way back in Volume Zero; re: “Doubles, Dark Forces and Paradox“). Being neoliberal/fascist, TERFs function as canonical gatekeepers, submitting to vice in their own token roles while reacting in bad-faith towards those who defy the social order by reclaiming vice in sex-positive ways. Generally this involves two basic steps: self-persecution, followed by self-defense with extreme prejudice. Apathy and murder pimping the whore out of state revenge, basically.
This perfidious theatre justifies the TERF’s lethal response, granting them the right to be as cruel as they want. The victims of their treachery can be authors who generate counterculture media, but also trans persons who author their own, chosen genders. Both are iconoclasts, but sometimes iconoclasts select their gender identities and make media without cryptonymy (thus masks): loud and proud!
(exhibit 113a: Five LGBTQ game designers whose work goes back to the 1980s; source: Shakeena Johnson’s “Seven Trailblazing LGBT+ Pioneers,” 2021.)
Iconoclasm isn’t merely a choice, but something that goes beyond the individual. Contrary to popular opinion, a trans person does not choose to be trans—rather, does not choose to experience the overwhelming gender dysphoria[1] that pushes them away from their assigned gender identity (or some other catalyst if dysphoria is not the reason). Nor do they choose the discrimination and unequal punishment that results. Their biological sex, their assigned gender and the socio-economic forces that compel sexual and gender standardization—all are accidental parts of a broader sexist world the trans person is born into through no fault of their own.
Trans people still have agency and they still make choices; these simply involve societal conditions beyond their control. By shaping their personal identities as they see fit, their decisions inevitably lead to persecution. The same concept applies to authors and illustrations, which often represent actual people. The iconoclastic act—of deliberately reshaping a hero’s morphology beyond the established norm—is akin to choosing one’s own sexual/gender beliefs in a non-prescriptive manner. Its mere existence challenges the status quo, leading to gender trouble.
Note: I’ve written about Elphaba repeatedly in my life, and this wasn’t my first time doing so (re: “Why I Submit” and “On Goblins”), nor would it be the last (re: “Out of This World“); i.e., Elphaba was formative not just in my trans identity but that of a trans activist grappling with the dangers of trying to exist in a straight world hellbent on pimping her to snapping under reactive abuse. “How ’bout some fire, Scarecrow?”—Perse, 5/5/2025
Consider Gregory Maguire’s Wicked: The story is about Elphaba, a trans vice character whose ambiguous identity was pre-selected by Maguire, the author. Being gay and married, I’m not surprised that Maguire writes Elphaba’s own choices as melding inextricably with her persecuted status: She’s a witch—a symbol already martyred by patriarchal sexists in the real world—but also someone described has having chosen her sex and skin color: “Perhaps little green Elphaba chose her own sex, and her own color, and to hell with her parents.”
Maguire’s writing Elphaba as trans makes the novel far more iconoclastic than it might be otherwise. Yet, despite Maguire’s deliberately iconoclastic Oz, Wicked nonetheless launched his career. People liked the story (or rather, they liked the musical based off his work, which sanitized everything to G-rated extremes and launched Wicked to bestseller fame 10 years after it was written; source: Alex Witchel’s “Mr. Wicked,” 2007). The question is, why?
Prudence. For all his creative risks, I think Maguire was actually pretty careful in his approach. Yes, he famously humanized the Wicked Witch of the West, giving her a name and a past. He also deliberately framed her as sympathetic, if not strictly good. By his own admission, though, he deliberately wrote things to be ambiguous:
The play is a little less subtle than the novel in some ways. And I wanted the novel to be more ambiguous because that’s the nature of how I was trying to tell my story. To be ambiguous was my intent in the novel, partly because I wanted to pose the question, “How do we know what evil is and how do we know when we see it?” I wanted to pose the question, but I did not want to answer it, I wanted that answer to have to be the job of the reader. And so, to follow that along, I also pose lots of possibilities (source: Chloe Rabinowitz’ “Gregory Maguire Talks 25th Anniversary Edition of the WICKED Novel,” 2020).
In doing so, Maguire plays it fairly safe. There’s plenty of naughty ideas, but nothing definitive that would alienate him concretely.
This caution isn’t impossible to understand. Re: the “friends of Dorothy” method and similar “passwords” involves a careful amount of concealment to avoid overt hostility from straight people. And while Maguire may or may not have been using that strategy in no uncertain terms, I can’t help but detect a whiff of it in his Wicked novels. Rather than patently excoriate the Wizard and those in power, there’s a great deal of imperfect, sideways criticism.
For example, much like Sean Young lashing out against Hollywood, Elphaba lacks that “pure” victim status, instead being framed as someone outrageously angry. Maguire chose this on purpose. Perhaps, it was to illustrate the confusing nature of intersectional politics. Nevertheless, Elphaba, is absolutely the victim, a trans person who chose her skin color and sex, only to be killed ostensibly by her own father (the Wizard, who might have sired Elphaba by raping her mother). Maguire’s decision to not only understate this, but also intentionally confuse the facts, feels pretty toothless from a critical standpoint. If anything, he makes the “both sides” argument deliberately to complicate things, instead of stating the obvious: the Wizard is clearly the story’s villain from a dialectical-material standpoint.
Maguire also cared less about failing to deliver a pre-existing image that people had a very clear idea of, and more about transforming everything around it. He did so at length, making Oz as different from the 1939 film (or Baum’s earlier novels) as Elphaba herself was. In other words, he didn’t break into someone else’s church and desecrate the icons inside; he built his own church out of old bastardized language. There’s a buffer, a disguise that hides what he’s doing.
(artist: Persephone van der Waard)
By comparison, visuals artists that alter icons in isolation invariably get compared, side-by-side, to their canonical palimpsests. For example, I once drew Deet from the Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance as thicc(!). There wasn’t a grander story to distract from the changes, just a shapely Grottan posing for the camera. I very quickly found myself under attack by fans of the original design.
Though I was unaware of them at the time, the broader mechanics of this social exchange highlight the same perils faced by any author who defies the status quo. I remain entirely honest when I say I hadn’t intended to be an iconoclast—at least, not in relation to Deet’s body. On some level, I knew that drawing thicc women allows for them to exist[2] (especially in a world where women are generally fat-shamed to anorexic extremes), but I saw that as a win-win.
What I actually expected people to hate was the deliberately schlocky gore. Imagine my surprise when the drawing was removed “for depicting sexual content.” My loudest critics didn’t mind that Deet murdered Hup and was using his decapitated head like a sock puppet (that show is deliciously violent); they disparaged Deet’s uncharacteristic thicc-ness, declaring loud-and-proud that she was being portrayed “incorrectly”—i.e., into something she wasn’t supposed to be according to their cultural values. Thiccness, for them, wasn’t canon.
Without meaning to, my desire to self-express (through the kinds of bodies I find attractive) led to me being persecuted. I had struck a nerve connected to deeper social biases regarding the human body: fat-shaming. There’s more to be said about fandoms defending canonical body types—i.e., body values assigned by the bourgeoisie. However, deliberately choosing non-canonical bodies can ironically yield a tremendous amount of gender trouble all by itself; re:
(exhibit 113b: Artist: Mercedes the Muse. Mercedes also happens to be one of my muses. They reached out to me once to ask me to draw them, and I’ve been a large fan of their work ever since.
They take fetish outfits [which originally had a post-fascist flavor to them in 1970s BDSM culture] and use them to argue for worker rights, sex positivity and transgressive, counterculture art as free speech against the neoliberal/fascist powers that be. In other words, they take the imagery of the medieval cop and reclaim their torturous veneer through camp/schlock.)
Public outcry on Facebook is one thing. The problem is, the destruction of iconoclasts differ historically from the destroying of icons. Yes, there’s the vandalistic approach of pulling down of statues—i.e., to efface the Lost Cause Myth (which is good; the Civil War was about slavery and Southern Pride is a racist dogwhistle. Remember what I said about racism in metal? Check out the Rageaholic—a metal critic who just might be a Lost-Causer (Vlogging Through History’s “Abraham Lincoln: American Dictator – My Response (Part 1),” 2023). But history frowns equally upon the humanist iconoclast: the artist or thinker who plays with icons in literature, “destroying” them by transforming them into something new. Like the Toxic Avenger, but also those like Mercedes the Muse who identify with that character as a form of iconoclastic expression (exhibit 113b, above)!
Privileged authors like myself (I identified as cis-het when I drew Deet) experience less risk than more marginalized groups. The more marginalized you are, the more your iconoclastic notions affords you genuine, lethal punishment. Some ridicule those in power, including their bodies (Hasan’s “Elon Musk is not Human,” 2022). But some iconoclasts are trying to merely stand up for the rights of others by creating documents that defy the social order.
For example, re: when Nazis protestors raided the Institute of Sexology in 1933, they burned 20,000 books that argued for the rights of trans people, homosexuals, and women (a world first, at least by post-Enlightenment standards). I can’t say if Magnus Hirschfield intended to make an overt political statement. Nonetheless, his practice painted a giant target on the institute he oversaw. When the Nazi attacked, it wasn’t defense of a besieged community against an alien menace; it was a pointed attack by fascists against marginalized communities fighting for equality under an inherently unequal system.
Historical Nazis are easy to attack thanks to American neoliberal propaganda. However, most practicing Nazis are crypto-fascists. This isn’t to say they’re invisible. It just means they don’t call themselves Nazis. Jordan Peterson is an incredibly visible thought leader who doesn’t call himself a Nazi but literally dresses like Two-Face from Batman (source: Jordan B Peterson’s Instagram, if you can believe it) and “jokingly” wants his alt-right “trolls” to “clean up their rooms” (Hasanabi Productions’ “Joe Rogan DEBATES Jordan Peterson,” 2023); he’s still trying to flip the script by comparing consensual gender-correction surgeries to Nazi Germany (The Minority Report’s “Jordan Peterson Takes His Bond Villain Act To A Disgusting New Low,” 2022). In other words, he’s functioning like a Nazi by attempting to bad-faith criminalize gender equality in the fields of medicine and the humanities.
Peterson specifically calls these fields “post-modern neo-Marxist,” aka “Cultural Marxism.” The latter phrase is not just a Red Scare tactic; it’s a fascist dog whistle: Hitler himself famously described the Soviets as “Judeo-Bolshevist,” prosecuting eastward expansion into Soviet Russian to destroy “Cultural Bolshevism.” Not only were the Nazis inspired by the United States’ own Westward Expansion (re: “How the USA Inspired the Nazis”), they also borrowed heavily from American-style propaganda, replicating Hollywood to create a copy of fascism, not an anomaly. They were copycat killers and statesmen playing follow the leader right into their own graves.
Fascists are easy to critique; they’re Nazis. However, Neoliberals are just as bad because they
- permit Nazis to exist
- open the doors of power to Nazis
- look the other way when Nazis break shit and kill people
This includes TERFs. Not all TERFs are cis-het women; the gender-critical movement includes the Manosphere, and bad-faith feminists can be male, cis-queer, or even trans (re: trans-on-trans transmisia, NERFs, etc). Regardless of one’s biological sex, many TERFs are still “mask-on,” normalizing Nazis as people to respectfully debate in the free marketplace of ideas. TERFs are like the neoliberal dad from The Neverending Story (1984) reasoning with his fanciful son, Bastian. Bastion’s dad tells him to grow up and accept things the way they are.
Such urbane bosses regulate the control of art as the very extension of those they seek to manipulate through social-sexual-economic means: workers depicted through sexualized art, but also sex work as a means of economical control. TERF politeness gives way to SWERF rhetoric that flows in a fascist direction: “Don’t give Conan a pussy or make Skeletor a communist trans woman. Be nice to Nazis [the gatekeepers of gender and sexuality].” These SWERF gatekeeper mandates are dangerously similar to book-burning as a form of media control. So much so that, when things reliably get worse and marginalized communities suffer from Capitalism-in-crisis, TERFs will either turn a blind eye, cover it up, or fan the flames of a crypt they help build. Not just a box, nor a closet, but a furnace cryptonymy touches on in either direction.
To call this “gaslighting” feels morbidly appropriate: And “where they burn books, they will also ultimately burn people.”
(artist: unknown)
Conclusion: “Pussy on the Chainwax!” The Beginning of the End (of History)?
“I dreamed I saw a great wave climbing over green lands and above the hills. I stood upon the brink. It was utterly dark in the abyss before my fate. A light shone behind me, but I could not turn. I could only stand there, waiting.”
—Eowyn, The Return of the King (2003)
“History,” as something to end, refers to the brutal historical-materialism of Capitalism—i.e., those histories predicate on Capitalism’s coerced material conditions. This will end in one way or another. The question is, how?
(artist: Harmony Corrupted)
Picture this in your heads: Humanity stands on the edge of a great precipice. The void yawns. Clearly the end is nigh, but of what? Capitalism is undoubtedly Promethean; Gothic Communism seeks to avoid its great disaster, ending the cycle in hope of something better. Sadly, actual history is littered with the scorched remains of fascist victims, lobotomized behind the cryptonymic veil of neoliberalism and turned into hideous, unfeeling monsters. Many will die—have already died—before humanity emerges from the mausoleum. Whether we do or not as a species is entirely up to us.
This isn’t a baseless prediction, as the histories of Capitalism-in-decay show time and time again. The fire starts at the edges. It devours the outliers first, moving inward as it consumes every alternate mode of gender and sexual expression. Femboys and catboys slowly become extinct—not just their anathema images, but the associate victims as well. As marginalized groups become hauntologically imperiled, a love for the “sacred” toxic past begins to fester. Then monsters come—the zombies eating your brains, the vampires drinking your blood, the Amazons crushing you, the ghosts possessing you—until the whole dizzying mess starts to collapse. As Hogle rightly predicted, only the narrative crypt survives, a story of a story of a story trapped inside itself (re: ““The Restless Labyrinth: Cryptonomy in the Gothic Novel,” 1980); i.e., written on the walls in hieroglyphic blood, excrement, brains and ash as much as darkness visible.
Until this happens, the burial is lived, felt—the mind’s eye sealed over in cryptonymic “bricks” but also put out with “knives,” cutting into the brain itself. Meerloo’s menticide is a slow torture, a gradual rape. In the interim, what follows are the myopic alienation and total extinction of any non-normative person or identity you can think of: trans people, enbys, ace persons—on and on down the line, until homosexuality and gender performance are a myth, and cis men and cis women are all that remains, divided along strict, uncompromising lines. Soon, these fringe atrocities will creep inwards, ravaging the center as Foucault’s Boomerang comes full circle. Those in the middle aren’t fireproof; they merely have to wait longer before they’re burned alive, inside Omelas.
The perfidious hauntologies of sexual hierarchies subjugate to infantilizing extremes. Rendered deaf, dumb and blind, those under them become hopelessly dependent and trapped, oblivious to anything outside their cages: their own bodies, turned against them and those they love as they kill, kill, kill. Alas, the disappearance of iconoclastic language and ability to “play god” for canonized forms won’t erase the threat, only the ability to imagine, discuss and perform it openly in safe spaces; i.e., to “play god” in ways that safekeep the rights of workers in monstrous language.
The exceptions to these boundaries still exist, of course; they simply become invisible during Capitalist Realism, including the atrocities committed against them under said “realism’s” almighty illusions. The aim of Gothic Communism is to prevent that through an iconoclastic, praxial revival, using the Wisdom of the Ancients through new, Promethean “archaeologies” stemming the monstrous tide at its source: the Gothic imagination’s harmful xenophobia as reclaimed by workers liberating themselves from exploitation using xenophilic, demonic poetics. “Hell” as built by state scapegoats, becomes something to move towards away from state-supplied illusions that lead to Capitalist Realism, thus genocide; i.e., Le Guin’s 1973 “Omelas[3]“: “The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.” Or as Volume One argues,
Matrilineal descent, then, is a maverick intellectual pursuit tied to the struggles of everyday life under Patriarchal Capitalism, and one that can cultivate powerful social-sexual habits/pathways in service of sex positivity liberating nature from its patriarchal rapists’ perceived air of omnipotence. The door to other worlds—be they the proverbial stars, Hell, or simply “the beyond”—isn’t something to dread, but welcome and relish as a precious opportunity to change into something new. But it must occur using the same basic language and aesthetics “passed down” through older monstrous-feminine educators pilfered from Cartesian forms (source: “Knife Dicks”).
Those with power will be there, of course. From on high, the bourgeoisie lord over the entire trap, installing its boundaries to impose their will upon “lesser” individuals. Such negative freedom is universally toxic, spelling the premature end for so many people’s lives. This includes the tyrants trapped inside their glorious, melting fakeries. Hilter’s Nazis are the cliché example:
Wewelsburg Castle foundations date back to the Middles Ages. As the site stands today, the castle design dates to the 17th century. The castle is located near the Teutoburg Forest. The [then] believed the site where Arminus, a Germanic tribe leader defeated the Roman Army which in part lends the castle to ancient fantasy. For the last 75 years the castle has exuded a dark fascination luring Satanists and Neo-Nazi’s alike drawn in by pagan symbology and Nazi occultism making this site a kind of sadistic pilgrimage. Much of the pseudo-religious mystery that has surrounded this castle since 1945 of torch-lit ceremonies, ancient Nordic and pagan rituals and the mythos of the Ancient Aryan is all fake.
So, where do these rumours come from? Much of the rumours stem from Himmler’s own delusional understanding and interpretation of Germanic and Nordic mythology. He was fascinated by prophecy, magical power and the belief that the Aryans were a super race. The SS was designed to be the very embodiment of this belief. Himmler desperately wanted a facility where he could drum these values into future SS leaders. Acquired in 1934, Himmler leased the property for 100 years at the symbolic rental price of 1 Reichsmark per year. Initially he planned to turn the facility into a leadership school for SS officers’, but this later changed, and it was designed as a meeting point for the SS elite. The focus of the Wewelsburg Castle was to research pseudo-scientific theories of Germanic pre- and early history, medieval history, folklore and genealogy. All of this was intended to provide the underpinnings for the racial teachings of the SS. Vast archaeological excavation sites sprung up here and at other important sites such as the Externsteine, a place of Christian worship that was thought by the Nazi’s to have been a pagan place of worship.
So, what did they discover? In a word; Nothing. All theories put forward by Nazi archaeologists didn’t stand up to scrutiny and only through intimidation and suppression of academia were any of these theories able to be published. The lack of evidence didn’t stop Himmler though, if he couldn’t find the archaeology, he would fake it (source: “Matthew Menneke’s “Nazi Temple of Doom—The Real Castle Wolfenstein,” 2020).
However, fascist started in American and continues to reign there, shepherded by neoliberal assistance.
Whether through churches, politicians, celebrity sciences, conmen or thought leaders, neoliberals and corporations do much the same as Nazis, albeit to a different flavor and degree; their weapons are the language of American exceptionalism through Liberalism and neoliberalism’s free market in service of global US hegemony. All the same, these fatal authors will fall upon their own swords, dying ignominious deaths; maybe not in their lifetimes, but at some foreshadowed termination of their bloodline through the state as already in decay, thus doomed. It’s such a fake, short-sighted existence, brutal and misleading when it doesn’t need to be. It’s easy to think of Mussolini or Hitler dying like this, while so many capitalists watched from relative safety. However, the shadow of climate change will consume them, too. Carceral and complicit, their cryptonyms, chronotopes, and canon are nothing but paper castles—slowly reduced to ash as they feed the flames, then all at once consumed and blown away. “Nothing beside remains. Round the decay / Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare / The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
(artist: Harmony Corrupted)
That’s one ending. However, it needn’t come to pass. No, you have all the power you need, if you dare to go and look for it. To be sure, the quest will be long and hard; it will take a lifetime. But collectivity assembled, these disinterred “museums” form the threshold needed—not a shield, but an exhibit whose communion with the reinvented past remembers; whose unity and harmony with all persons seeking universal protection from tyrants can, at long last, seal them and their genocide histories away.
Enshrined in glass, the horrors of yesteryear become something to look on with quaint wonder and solemn dread: a time when the world was more brutal, more absurd, more deceitful and greedy. To avoid a second similar cataclysm, the Gothic must live on, must become something that spreads empathy and joy through sex-positive stories with friendly ghosts and happy monsters—not an infantile dumbness, but a re-remembering of the past through the active, emboldened imagination of a liberated proletarian mindset: an artistic movement and revolution, but referred to more colloquially by Key and Peele as “starting a thing” (re: “Shining a Light on Things“).
And why not? All deities reside within the human breast, the engine of creation as something that we—as Satanic Rebels, self-fashioned gods, demons and undead—can use to author a collective destiny away from bourgeois exploitation. Again, creation is fun, but also vital to preserving who we are in the face of genocide. We can become the gods now as many before us already have in defense of the rights of workers.
(exhibit 114: Artist, left: Key and Peele; artist, top-middle-right: Maya Mochii; artist, far-top-right, bottom-middle right and far-bottom-right: Alyssa Adelene.)
The aim of this thing is not to forget in blind hedonism, but “to put… the pussy… on the CHAINWAX!” Beyond combining the general ingredients we’ve already discussed—the Six Rs, the Four Gs, the Gothic mode of expression (its means and materials of production: monsters, lairs/parallel space, hermeneutics, phobias, and mediums); but also its oppositional praxis: to illustrate mutual consent, descriptive sexuality and cultural appreciation through informed consumption and ironic performance, including sex-positive fetishes, kinks, BDSM and Gothic sensations as reverse-abject, emancipatorily hauntological/chronotopic, and revolutionarily cryptonymic.
What those demonic poetics and “hubris” exactly entail is less vital to remember than where we came from and who we’ve become/are becoming through sex positivity as we move forward onto better days: away from a post-scarcity world, away from endless war and exploitation by the elite, and their horrid, interminable illusions designed to trap and brainwash us. Peace of mind comes from having survived and transformed in the face of struggle, which Matthew Lewis put best near the end of The Monk:
The remaining years of Raymond and Agnes, of Lorenzo and Virginia, were happy as can be those allotted to Mortals, born to be the prey of grief, and sport of disappointment. The exquisite sorrows with which they had been afflicted, made them think lightly of every succeeding woe. They had felt the sharpest darts in misfortune’s quiver; Those which remained appeared blunt in comparison. Having weathered Fate’s heaviest Storms, they looked calmly upon its terrors: or if ever they felt Affliction’s casual gales, they seemed to them gentle as Zephyrs which breathe over summer-seas (source).
Once awake, the bad dream before class consciousness can finally end. Moreover, sex workers can stay awake, post-myopia. Undrugged, unmolested, and unlobotomized, but also in full possession of their faculties and out from under Zombie Capitalism’s nefandous influence, they suddenly become free—to compare and connect things, but also build a better parallel society to vertical state power that eventually just becomes the world beyond the Capitalocene. This starts and continues by educating it in sex-positive ways that use fun activities (rock ‘n roll, drugs in moderation, social activism and sex) as well as happy “monstrous” toys to foster trust and encourage good play while also shaming sexual coercion. To retell the sexy past with past things, their archaeologies become less about sifting through the rubble of war and more about finally controlling the Base to shape the Superstructure. De-alienized, they can reunite with their own labor and drop the cryptonymic disguise, but not their caution.
So, while the Patriarchal Wizard of Oz might be dead and his “winged monkeys”—formerly dressed up as “witches” in bad faith—finally disrobed, they can always return. Anticipating this, the traumas must be collectively re-remembered and survived in art as an open, living process—not a barely-whispered ghost of the counterfeit tucked behind a dark forest of cryptonyms inside a hauntological castle, but a mode of active imagination, thought, and being that puts the hidden atrocities front and center (and keeps all the fun stuff—i.e., the monsters, BDSM, fetishes and kinks; the mutually consensual power exchange as a lesson to dress up and impart time and time again, with whatever way you and yours orient/are sexually and asexually compatible with and happy doing together). Through the Gothic Communist mode, individuals and communities can invest in Capitalism’s continued burial—its staying dead under vigilant workers who actively and consciously invest in their own happiness by routinely building parallel societies that help learn to social-sexually trust each other as a group the world over.
To teach, love, and learn how to imagine as one people in ways that have yet to exist (which includes all the chonky animals, plants and the environment, too); to look at the old images of the past—not the valorous masculine dead who proved their mettle on the battlefield in service of nation-states, but the gentle dead; the sad and the wretched who were invisible in life and dead under Capitalism, which robbed of their memories, their identities, their voices as whatever images remain stare into the present like sad ghosts—and remember them as people who suffered greatly under Capitalism; to bury those poor, voiceless dead and let them rest know their killers are gone, that they have been avenged and they may finally rest. With closure comes healing and with healing comes peace, the end of a history formerly known as genocide, exploitation and war. And if that seems rough, then nothing helps a tough session like a bit of carefully timed aftercare: drugs, sex, videogames—”pick your poison,” as the saying goes.
(exhibit 115: Model and photographer, top-left: Sharbat Gula and Steve McCurry; artist, top-right: Jeff Widener; bottom-left: source; bottom-right: source.)
That’s the other ending (which really is just a wiser continuum moving into the future). And while it certainly sounds better than the alternative, it is nevertheless centuries away. In the interim, there is justice, no peace. We are at war. I’m not saying punch CEOs, TERFs or Nazis (though if you did, I wouldn’t complain); individual cases of physical violence are far less important than striking them where it hurts: their propaganda. This requires parallel space, ironic consumption, parody and reverse abjection, but also de facto educators conveying mutual consent, descriptive sexuality and cultural appreciation through counterculture art—Gothic art. Combined, these factors can
- denude/demask the fascist as an insecure impostor and killer-in-disguise.
- break the neoliberal spell/concentric veneer by demonstrating the Symbolic Order as an arbitrary construct, exposing the bourgeoisie—and Capitalism’s Promethean hierarchy—as the ultimate foe.
- humanize other groups through xenophilic (a)sexual alternatives to the establish norm.
- deromanticize the TERF infatuation with us-versus-them violence disguised as revolution; e.g., the TERF Medusa or Amazon, while still utilizing the Dark aesthetic as universally adaptable to our proletarian cause (our own masks, uniforms, disguises, and enrichment through the subversion of colonial norms [violence] using ironic BDSM, kink and Gothic countercultural art).
This recoding of the Superstructure can affect the Base, thus alter society at a material level. However, these radical ideas first need to materialize—not through wishful thinking but by attaching to material conditions that make them ideologically viable, in pro-police thinking that leads to genocide in bad faith (re: TERFs are cops in disguise, including Amazons, below). This requires teamworking within the system to generate capital for counterterrorism; i.e., mid-cryptonymy in hauntological language that reverses abjection during the whore’s revenge in duality. Sex work is work, generating the means to launch a countercultural narrative versus our enemies on and offstage: the whore’s revenge happening on the Aegis as multimedia, fluid, holistic, determined by dialectical-material scrutiny instead of aesthetic: “darkness” as code, as alter-ego (re: “Prey as Liberators“).
The more decay, the more cryptonymy, which goes both ways. On all registers, the oppressed and their intersectionally solidarized pedagogies can reify persecuted groups through parallel artwork; i.e., exposing vertical arrangements of power as tyrannical while pushing Numinously towards universal liberation with ludo-Gothic BDSM. Among our enemies (other workers, token or not), cognitive dissonance can take hold, their brains seeded by informed, ironic consumers and iconoclastic performers illustrating something better for all peoples: a better possible world, and one where the second ending might just replace the first.
(artist: Anato Finnstark)
Kicks After Six: Always Another Castle
When such a castle appears, it is time to be afraid; the colonial harvest is at hand. Yet, precisely because the state does not hold a monopoly over violence, terror and morphological expression, a demon or castle needn’t spell our end; it can represent our sole means of attack, reclaiming said poetics’ endless inventiveness to turn colonizer fears back into their hopelessly scared brains (source).
—Persephone van der Waard, “Prey as Liberators”
Rape = profit, which the state achieves through genocide; the state wants what workers have, which it takes through force: to police sex (and nature) through threats carried out by traitors against a perceived alien. We camp all of these to have the whore’s revenge—not once, but repeatedly until Medusa takes us home. Until then, we are Her dutiful vanguard—stewards of nature policed as monstrous-feminine, protecting ourselves and all life from state abuse, including any pimping that occurs in bad faith.
In Gothic, castle = power and power takes infinite forms, mise-en-abyme. To critique power and reclaim it, you must go where it appears—to return, ever and always, to the castle coming back to you, thus that special place where the Wisdom of the Ancients can be harnessed again: through paradox and falsehood. Power is performance, and there is always another castle—one where the ghosts of our ancestors await, and where workers dance (and fuck) with trouble; i.e., as something not only to find, but make as stand-ins thereof: castles-in-the-flesh, the Medusa in small but nonetheless stacked!
(model and artist: Harmony Corrupted and Persephone van der Waard)
I’ve written six books now, concluding Sex Positivity for you to find and make trouble with! Capital is a cycle of abuse. So when the Man comes around, show him your Aegis! Chase the Numinous and use the Medusa’s hellish power—your hellish power—to humanize the harvest! Anisotropically expose the state as inhumane! Reverse terrorist and counterterrorist during class war as guerrilla war! And in doing so, let them see you having your revenge—exposing the elite (and their proponents, token or not) on the very mirrors normally used to rape us: “what she’s never had, all the things that make a good girl bad!” (The Scorpions’ “Kicks After Six,” 1990).
Despite how exploitation and liberation share the same space, the state and Capitalist Realism only have what power they are given! Take it back during the cryptonymy process. Use your land, labor and sex/gender to break state monopolies; i.e., through your own castles mirroring state doubles to reverse abjection, when the state is weak. The Gothic is writ in disintegration, meaning there is always another castle, hence opportunity for revenge! Castles are power and power = symbols of power in Gothic, mise-en-abyme. But you have to go to and make them, playing with power as such; re: sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll, unfurled during ludo-Gothic BDSM: raising… awareness, of course!
Medusa’s waiting! Go and find her, then make the world a better place!
(model and artist: Maybel & Jackie and Persephone van der Waard)
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] The psychological distress that results from an incongruence between one’s sex assigned at birth and one’s gender identity.
[2] I hadn’t meant to represent anyone in a strictly iconoclastic fashion. Regardless, that’s precisely what happened: During the ensuring debate, a grateful moderator defended me, saying it represented their actual body and how they looked. Cool!
[3] An imaginary utopia predicated on the singular suffering of one individual to the boon of all others. Those who cannot rationalize the suffering of this one unhappy being leave the vampiric comfort of the fortress to seek out a home in the perceived darkness of an impossible world. For the exile, as Edward Said notes, the pleasure is found in a contrapuntal acceptance of one’s assigned home as foreign, violence and alien, but wherein one can account for something better mid-exodus.