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.
Half-Real: Recognizing And Performing Empathy (feat. Meowing from Hell and Sean Jones)
“That the rules of a game are real and formally defined does not mean that the player’s experience is also formally defined. However, the rules help create the player’s informal experience. Though the fictional worlds of games are optional, subjective, and not real, they play a key role in video games. The player navigates these two levels, playing video games in the half-real zone between the fiction and the rules” (source).
—Jesper Juul, Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds (2005)
Traveling in a light beam
Laser rays and purple skies.
In a computer fairyland
It is a dream you bring to life (source).
—Pascal Languirand; “Living on Video,” on Trans-X’s Living on Video/Message on the Radio (1983)
Picking up where “Chapter One: Sex Positivity (opening and ‘Illustrating Mutual Consent’)” left off…
We’ve laid out the relationship between workers and the elite as it pertains to art in the workplace (and peoples’ respective roles in this unfair arrangement). Now let’s further examine mutual consent as it exists in sexualized artwork: as a complex, ongoing relationship between art and the viewer under Capitalism. This includes our own lives and the emotional intelligence required when performing successful praxis through our own social-sexual customs. Art and life aren’t separate; they flow in and out of each other, one informing the other. We’ll examine examples of either, then apply them to sex-positive lessons we can express in our own iconoclastic lives and art; re: with models like Harmony working with artists like myself, but also Sean Young (next page):
(artist: Harmony Corrupted)
Note: This is the first portion of Sex Positivity I ever conceptualized and wrote down; i.e., standing in my kitchen and rubbing my chin thoughtfully about illustrate mutual consent and how to go about it. Everything else—from Gothic Communism to ludo-Gothic BDSM to Metroidvania “danger discos” to Amazons—comes after this basic premise as I raised it back then. —Perse, 4/20/2025
First, art itself. As part of a collective effort to defend worker rights, artists foster empathy. However, even when empathy is functionally present, mutual consent—and by extension, bodily autonomy—are difficult to isolate in pin-up art or photography. When genuine empathy is absent, it’s not like an activist can talk directly to the sexist image; they can’t ask the prop-like girl on display if she agreed to be photographed. Even if she did, further context is generally not communicated by the artist, the model or the patron. She could be wearing her makeup for herself versus for the audience, but don’t expect the picture (or its assemblage of co-contributors) to communicate that each and every time.
Take this picture of a pretty girl (Sean Young) smoking a cigarette. It can be
- an advertisement overtly selling the product (the cigarette, but also the girl, who is a sexual promise to consumers: “smoking makes you sexy” or “smoking gets you laid”)
- product placement in a film, appropriated to boost sales
- part of the story in ways that appreciate the mere existence of cigarettes (or their advertisement) as part of the world, not as something to directly sell to the audience
Three different uses of the same basic image: a girl and a prop, and different ways to assist in either through play. However, none of these functions communicate mutual consent (or its absence) regarding the girl herself. To do so requires empathy as a means of investigating the image beyond its surface-level visuals: the girl as more than mere object, but someone with basic human rights, specifically her ability to consent as a worker (and promote this idea through her own likeness, which neoliberal corporations will privatize for their own ghoulish purposes—below, exhibit 62b).
(exhibit 62b: Top: Blade Runner screenshots; bottom-left: Gui Guimaraes; middle: Ronin Dude; bottom-right: Jeremy Anninos. Neoliberal Capitalism is an experiment of the owner class that turns the likeness of the girl [or the man] into a product that enforces heteronormative roles sold through cheap canonical “junk food”: Blade Runner‘s poster girl selling Coke to the audience, which, like cigarettes, historically contained whatever chemicals corporations could put in them to coerce purchases. This tasty treat can certainly be enjoyed [usually with varying degrees of guilt] but should not be blindly endorsed; its canonical presence denotes exploitation as sublimated by the replica as the product, the worker entirely replaced by their own likeness. The bourgeois copycat becomes something to mass produce in the cheapest way possible, selling canonical hauntology to the masses: useful brain chemicals triggered by formulaic pleasure sites—the cyberpunk ruin and its boys and girls with their various props and superpowers, their cool gadgets, their guns. As stated during “Origins and Lineage” from Volume Zero, such creations are often liminal, combining the retro-future Western and other genres to introduce imperfect allegories with leftist potential [re: Lucas, Star Wars]. These allegories must be disinterred from the midden and expanded upon, reintroduced in ways that transmute canonical praxis/vice persecution for iconoclastic variations that strip away the cheap canonical junk food/product placement [and its fascist/neoliberal outcomes and pro-state subterfuge, bad-faith “beards,” nuptials, etc] for something far more emotionally/Gothically enriching: sex-positive brain food with revolutionary potential that can still disguise and keep us safe from TERFs, cryptofascists and other reactionaries unfettered by neoliberal agents by reclaiming vice, humanizing it again; exhibit 62c.)
While the starting point of empathetic recognition/performance is presentation and function—how the image is being shown and why—the investigator needs empathy to identify the human rights abuses or celebrations, be these implied, declared, or haunted. For example, if an image was manufactured to profit the bourgeoisie, the drawing is probably sexist. However, confirming this suspicion generally requires a fair amount of investigation, which won’t occur if empathy for the subject is not present within the examiner. The problem is, canonical hauntology tends to inspire hollow, abstract, or displaced empathy that doesn’t undermine elite hegemony at all; it relies on people to confuse the ghost of counterfeit as simply “spice” that paying customers deserve, not sprinkles of Soylent Green.
However, if Gothic stories communicate trauma and Gothic Communism is the interrogation of trauma (in its various forms) as a historical-material consequence, then empathy is the mindfulness of trauma mid-exploration—be it one’s own or someone else’s. The image—as something to investigate and comprehend—extends to living people in front of us, who we associate with symbols of women and the social behaviors attached to the symbols that carry over to their representees. When taken literally and without nuance, this generates a divide between reality and canon, effacing the person behind the image. Moreover, it weakens the viewer’s emotional intelligence regarding social cues as things to read in relation to people as images.
For example—and here’s a bit of dating advice from Mommy Persephone to cis-het men: PWMs (re: people who menstruate) are canonized as women. Regardless of this unwanted standardization, even if a PWM is actually cis-het, most girls really don’t like getting hit on everywhere they go from random strangers (the same idea applies to any marginalized group, but this particular advice is pointedly aimed at white cis-het men being the most privileged, tone deaf and abusive group at a systemic level, so I’ll be sticking to cis-gendered models to keep things simple)! Dating is an incredibly complex and game-like endeavor whose rules are not fixed or communicated in simple language; indeed, their education to the public exists in opposition using shared language operating at cross purposes.
Despite chercher la femme being canonical praxis, for instance, girls actually prefer to have some say and control in these exchanges by representing for themselves what the symbol of woman means; i.e., not just an object of pursuit by men, but a fully autonomous being that can self-express in various (a)sexual ways should they choose. Even if that control is them being able to put on the sexy dress and be able to predictably get cat-called—if they predicted it and welcomed it, that’s still their choice, their agency to sex-positively “flash” in some shape or form towards a public audience.
(exhibit 62c: Artist, top-left: Cheun; bottom-left: Alyssa; top-middle: Sciamano204; bottom-middle: Tiffany Valentine; top-right, source: a “gender critical” TERF counter-protesting a gender-recognition reform bill in Scotland; bottom-right: Angela, the coercively demonized trans character from Sleepaway Camp, 1983 [“The Real Peter Baker,” 2012]. Despite that film making Angel a transphobic, “cavewoman” exhibit, she has every reason to be enraged with the status quo.
(exhibit 62e: The Busenaktion [“breast action”] of 1969 [nice]. Radical students protesting Frankfurt fancy-pants, Theodor Adorno: “After a student wrote on the blackboard, ‘If Adorno is left in peace, capitalism will never cease,’ three women students approached the lectern, bared their breasts and scattered flower petals over his head” [source tweet: whyvert]. Ferocious boobies. Run away, Brave Sir Robin, you’re being repressed by killer rabbits!)
(exhibit 62f: Artist: Persephone van der Waard. Cavegirl Ayla from Chrono Trigger, 1995—in the words of Jadis, “Chonk, stronk and ready to bonk” [with “bonk” being slang for fucking—e.g., boning, boinking—but also her tendency to literally “bonk!” lizardman over the head with her club; re: “Death by Snu-Snu“].)
Liminalities aside, there’s a pretty big functional difference between showing some skin and literally flashing one’s junk (versus female nipples, which are canonically treated as sex organs when they actually are not sex organs). Frankly, more aggressive forms of exhibitionism are generally relegated to erotic art or transgressive performance art (exhibit 62c). This can be appreciative or appropriative—with trans people and sluts more broadly being made exhibits of tied to horrifying violence meant to incite moral panics and lead to mass public shamings: “Don’t show your body or have premarital sex or you might be a slut, sex demon, transsexual, etc” (conflations that we’re examine more in Chapter Three).
However, if a girl wants to reclaim sluttiness and other abjected variables by grooming a figurative/literal beard, rocking a tramp stamp, flexing her strength (exhibit 62f) showing her pussy to a consenting audience (exhibit 61), or showing off a “whale tail,” do not shame her. Look but do not stare, and definitely don’t touch her without her express permission (such matters become more intuitive after first contact, of course: “red light, green light,” etc). Flashing can certainly be a transgressive, “live” political act, but this is relative to the room in question; no one is going to stroll into a Baptist congregation and flash the ministry without a backup plan (unless they want to martyr themselves, even if inadvertently like Oscar Wilde did during his own trial for gross indecency [Douglas Linder’s “The Trials of Oscar Wilde: An Account,” 2023] for being a queer man in 1895—the first trial of its kind [though not the first attacking queer people before “homosexual” was an official term; re: Broadmoor]). More likely flashing is performed in ways that grant the performer agency without infringing on the rights of others, or punching up against powerful authority figures (men of reason) for whom the act will not pose any real threat (exhibit 62e).
Moreover, ordinary girls wearing “sexy clothes” (which honestly may as well just be clothes in general, as women’s clothes—even Walmart-brand stuff—are subtly/not-so-subtly sexualized by men by default) is still not an invitation to abuse them, obnoxiously stare at them, or hector them, nor is them rejecting you regardless of how they go about it (and spare me your “what ifs,” please; I’m talking about regular people, not outlier cases when a woman is mentally ill, prone to destructive behavior, or under someone else’s power to try and fleece you)! Most dudes not only can’t take the hint; they’ll blame the victim:
Likewise, an incel, nice guy or creep is still creepy regardless if they think they’re God’s gift to women. To hit on someone without reading the room is foolish; to do so in a room where sex and dating aren’t really on the table to begin with doesn’t help your case or your odds. Try a dating website or some other place where you and they both know that being there is a precursor to sex if you play your cards right—not at the laundromat, bus stop, or some other public space where they’re just going through their day and don’t want to be bothered; e.g., “When I’m at the gas station, this ain’t no Christian mingle!” (Greg Doucette’s “Girl Gets Slammed over Viral TikTok Video,” 2022; timestamp: 8:11). Trust me: You’re not so charming that they’ll think otherwise, let alone drop their panties and suck you off, let alone marry you and have your kids. To think otherwise is to infantilize them. Likewise, “friendzone” isn’t a thing so don’t say they’re doing that to you? What I mean is, it’s a not a legitimate thing to accuse someone of not wanting to be with you; it’s a strawman, one that self-reports when used unironically.
To that, cis-het men (or anyone in the Man Box), women (or any chosen mates) don’t owe you sex, and bullying them isn’t going to make them want to sleep with you. Doing so only lowers your odds of success by your own metrics, leading many white, cis-het men to blame women, not Capitalism, for their failures; but even if you “succeed” in the way you’re taught, a “body count” is a poor metric for success if it costs you the ability to relate to other people—i.e., to treat them like people instead of objectives inside a larger game. There’s always an element of luck involved when it comes to love, but reducing the odds through force cheats everyone involved by turning you into a bully and the other people into victims (whereas “changing the odds” through class warfare makes it much easier for you to find love without chasing someone down and coercing sex out of them).
This being said, love (and affairs) can happen at work and on the road. My first serious relationship started when I was 29 and happened with a 20-year-old girl I met at the bus stop. I’ll call her Constance Reid (after her favorite book, D. H. Lawrence’s last novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 1929). Before you say “pot, meet kettle,” consider that we lived in the same town and took the same bus route everyday—first to the nearest city and then to different colleges. We saw each other every day and she talked to other people on the bus. At first, I was shy. In fact, I was socially awkward at school and had been going to therapy to help learn how to make friends in person, including how to make romantic partners (after having several unsuccessful attempts at this point). After several weeks of watching this person and wanting to talk to them, I shyly broke the ice: “So, is that your boyfriend?” They’d just been talking with someone who looked like their boyfriend. When asked, they didn’t run away screaming. Instead, they simply said yes. We talked for the next several weeks on the bus, commuting four hours(!) to and from school every day. Turns out, we were both unable to drive and had similar timetables despite going to different schools in the area. What are the odds, right?
Learning relationships is like learning to paint. You’re gonna make mistakes along the way. But you have to be willing to try. I was bearded like Karl Marx (exhibit 63a) and she was pale, zaftig and enchanting. We slowly grew closer, talking about rock ‘n roll, literature and artwork until eventually I shaved my beard (for some reason, I decided to keep a porn ‘stache). The girls at school certainly noticed, one crying out in class, “You look different! I can see your face!” I took this as a good sign. After class, I decided to “make a move” that night on the bus with Constance. This involved me telling her I wanted to kiss her despite her having a boyfriend (and me stating I didn’t care; I was bold, to be honest, and had much to learn). For all my gusto, I was frankly terrified. I played it cool, though. I even did the old “yawning trick” from Hellboy (2004) and put my arm around her shoulder. Much to my surprise, she happily gave me some sugar. Turns out, she barely knew the person she “was with”; they’d only just met on the bus like me!
(exhibit 63a: Me still in the closet: from Kurt Russel to Jesus to Jonny Cash in under a week!)
A few days later, Constance came over to visit me at my grandparent’s house. There I was, sitting on the porch reading Henry IV (1598) for class (on a page, no less, where Hotspur’s wife is doling out all these none-too-subtle sexual innuendos to her husband, wanting him to eat her out instead of riding his stupid war horse all the time). Along comes Constance, riding up on her bicycle like Albert Einstein. We ended up going upstairs to watch Rosemary’s Baby (1968). About halfway through, she’s giving me bedroom eyes—in my bedroom. So, I stopped for a moment, thought about it, then asked, “Can I kiss you?” She said yes and I did. After we kissed, I figured, might as well go for the gold, laid my hand on her stomach and asked, “Can I touch your pussy?” Constance consented and I went about it. She didn’t seem to mind. When I asked her if she wanted to have sex, she said she had to break up with her boyfriend first. Curious.
That was a long week. After Constance broke up with her boyfriend, we made plans to have sex. Leading up to having sex, we talked about our histories. She told me she was a virgin; I told her about my Hep C (which I had contracted mysteriously and didn’t even know I had it, requiring me to jump through a lot of hoops to get the medication I needed to lower my viral count to “cured” levels) and sexual history. We planned for about a week, selecting time for her to come over where we could have some privacy and give things a shot. On the fateful night in question, we held each other in the dark on the way home (it was winter and the bus was dark on the inside to allow the driver to see). She said she was nervous but excited; I asked if she still wanted to do it and she said yes. I had purchased some condoms ahead of time. Using one, we had sex that night. It wasn’t the “best” sex in the world (she was a virgin and I had to be gentle and patient) but she was a little poet—mad as a hatter but still my Fairy Queen (which I called her, after Titania from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1605).
Regardless of the sex and how good it felt (it was nice, to be fair), the whole experience taught me a lot: that learning someone’s body is like learning to appreciate a good song or book; it takes time and repeated viewings, but a willingness to engage with a fun toy that plays back. More to the point, any time we were in bed or out, I never forgot her needs or placed them above my own; despite my initial boldness, I always asked if this was ok and didn’t just assume. I also learned that I liked discovering what she liked or disliked in general, but especially music: Constance likes Van Halen, Zeuhl likes The Who and The Cars (and a million other bands; re: “The Eyeball Zone“), Jadis likes Tool and NIN (re: “Seeing Dead People“), and Cuwu liked Slush Puppy and FKA Twigs (re: “Out of This World“), etc. All the flowers are beautiful and unique, not just the ones that Capitalism privatizes and sells back to you with your own labor.
The point of my story isn’t to crow about my own accomplishments, but to illustrate the complexities of having a relationship, no matter the length. Ours was intense but brief, with Constance breaking things off after several months and us only having sex four times (and me only cumming twice). Turns out, Constance was largely looking for someone to lose her virginity to and I’m the person she chose (she was also ghastly afraid of getting pregnant several days after having sex; i.e., a childish misunderstanding of how pregnancy works, but also the fear of pregnancy after missing one’s period as being a very female fear). Not gonna lie, that broke my heart. However, seven years later, we briefly touched base again, only for her to tell me she never forgot me, that I would always be her fairy queen. More to the point, she thanked me for being gentle with her that first time. Not only that, but she said that she was using what I taught her in her own relationships. It was a compliment I was only too happy to take—that I could be empathetic towards her in ways she remembered years after the fact. We both got something positive out of it.
Let’s take the same idea of empathy and respecting someone’s agency and apply it to an everyday situation, one where we view it through a Gothic-Communist lens.
(artist: Nigel Van Wieck)
You see a girl at the bus stop. She’s an ordinary person—a worker like the majority of people under Capitalism—and she seems usually on edge when a polite man moseys up and starts hitting on her. He’s not some Disney villain; he’s just an average Joe, a regular worker just like her. For the sake of argument, let’s level the playing field slightly and say they’re both “fives” and single (to be clear, sliding scales are incredibly shallow and anyone who uses one to seriously gauge a person’s value in the Sexual Marketplace™ is probably bigoted—doubly so if they apply it to their jawline or IQ levels, too).
Let’s also say there’s no obvious red flags. Our Romeo is nice, but she doesn’t care. She rejects him with a curt “fuck off” before icing him out. Even if there’s no ill intent and she still “bites his head off,” her being rude doesn’t change the dialectical-material reality that women are raped and killed by men far more than the other way around; they also go their whole lives being being reminded by popular media that any man, if slighted, will kill and rape them, and cops won’t believe them (as for the dude, I’m pretty his wounded feelings will survive a tongue-lashing from someone who can’t physically hurt him—grow a pair, buttercup). Do we have to like her for doing it? No, but we can try to understand her position relative to the man’s; despite both of them being workers, she’s far more disadvantaged than he is. What’s more and he—polite or not—was cross her boundaries at the cultural level by hitting on her in a laundromat. Crossing boundaries is fine, but if she wants to reject him with extreme prejudice, she’s still the disadvantaged party by a mile. Moreover, learning to read the room and develop a social-sexual “radar” for these things will make such “horror stories” far less common than you might think. I fucked up at first, too; but eventually I got better at it by not hitting on girls at the laundromat, or the teller at by bank who’s just trying to do her job and be polite. In short, I learned “how to play” by learning the ropes beyond the formal/intended rules, but also the informal/emergent rules of play.
The idea of sex-as-dangerous manifests in Gothic hauntology at large, showcasing sexuality as imperiled by Gothic analogues: the castle. Regardless of the exact format, Gothic stories more broadly illustrate the complexities and ambiguous of human, social-sexual interactions under Capitalism; i.e. ,as informed by the imaginary past and its recycled conventions, reifying a dimorphic, “Love is a Battlefield” scheme presented in phenomenological terms: through the ballroom drama as ergodic, thus requiring a “game,” skilled and savvy player to navigate the perils thereof—i.e., is my dance partner a killer or not? This isn’t just a cliché from a story that demands dance partners a priori, but a half-real commentary on the Neo-Gothic, Romantic-quotidian struggles of women forced into doing customary social-sexual rituals in everyday activities that men don’t even think about; e.g., the Metroidvania as a summoning of the castle for a heroine to move around inside according to gendered roles that promote, promise and threaten, but also subvert and transgress sex as a dangerous-if-titillating position—i.e., the urgency of it all tied to conventional expressions of the human condition predicated on material conditions, specifically the taught/flaccid libido as something to comment on in various ways that comment on meeting through such examples:
You’ve got a pussy
I have a dick, ah
So what’s the problem?
Let’s do it quick (Rammstein’s “Pussy,” 2009).
While the romance is a facsimile for codified interactions, dalliance and rendezvouses, women (or beings forced to identity as women, or at least feminine) are doing everyday activities implicitly coded for them as romanticized courtship rituals, despite many of them being things women simply do to get from point A to point B. In these liminal spaces, they don’t want to be outed as “whistleblowers” for just standing up for themselves. It’s a pretty low bar, but one that society still punishes the woman for “violating” by default: “Don’t go out, don’t wear sexy clothes or you’re “asking for it!'” But in equally Gothic terms, a veil is no defense when the game is in play. As Matthew Lewis pointed out over two centuries ago, the canonized ritual is to hit on any maiden, even if she’s veiled. Canonical “modesty” is not protection from predators, but segregation; indeed, those “protecting” you are, more often than not, the very people who abuse you, then lie about it to your face. Deception comes with the package in Man Box culture; giving them what they want/endorsing their ideology is incredibly dangerous and only prolongs abuse (exhibit 87e1/2).
(exhibit 63b: Rape culture is romanticized as normal through nostalgia. For example, Matthew McConaughey as Wooderson in Dazed and Confused [1993] says, “That’s what I love about these high school girls, man. I get older, they stay the same age.” Not only is this pedophilic behavior utterly textbook; the act of grooming is normalized, through Man Box, in a role model for younger men to follow and emulate in a nostalgic worldview: the 1970s and its hatred of women as sex objects to exploit by resentful, covetous men. Indeed, for them “woman is other” translates to the resenting of women as the assigned givers of pleasure that is owed to men, but taught to men by men that they must win this pleasure through deception and force. Such hatred plays out during fascist expansion through radicalized male culture under crisis: the “incel,” aka “involuntary celibate” as a kind of “straw dog.”
Likewise, many would-be rapists/incels are often conventionally prettier than people care to admit, meek-looking-yet-menacing real-life murderers like Eliot Rodger eliding with the rape fantasy as romanticized and mass-produced for white women; e.g., Alexander Skarsgaard as Charlie from Rod Lurie’s 2011 Straw Dogs or Adam Driver as Jacques Le Gris from Ridley Scott’s The Last Duel [2021]: the blackguard, the rogue, the lothario-as-rapist Quixotic who things he understands what love is and then rapes the professed recipient, then aims to retreat into the Church as a black penitent. Of the Black Penitents, Nick Groom writes in The Italian‘s explanatory notes,
Penitential orders were Roman Catholic monastic orders in which the members undertook severe penance or mortifcations of the flesh. The chief Confraternity of the Black Penitents is the Misericordia (also known as the Beheading of St. John), established in 1488 to give aid to those condemned to death [… “having the power] to release one criminal per year and shelter him from capital punishment” […] Radcliffe presents the Black Penitents as clothed in sackcloth adorned with a death’s head.
Clearly words like penitentiary still exist and, indeed, are commonplace under Pax Americana as a domesticated slaving ground built around the business of false imprisonment and cruel punishment: a fear but also romanticization of the jailed as paradoxically privileged.
Moreover, the inverse applies to a corrupt system whose privileged few could retreat within to dodge punishment—i.e., an exclusive sanctuary hinted at by Radcliffe’s own outmoded romance [The Italian‘s second title being The Confessional of the Black Penitents]. Her bigoted, xenophobic terrors were outdated by the time she penned them, done so at least in part to comment on the hauntological nature of the abuse of power and presence of rape within mighty institutions renowned for their legendary harm: the Church, but also the knights templar brought forward out of the past in new fearsome forms; i.e., the black knight as false holy order adorned with skulls, promising torture and death to their own torturous heroes and far worse to everyone else [which both Radcliffe and Scott posit onto an imaginary Eastern European, but also the Catholic Church; their Protestant dogma/anti-French lens is both standard-issue British polemic, as well as a semi-false, but also partially legitimate barb common in such fictions]. The Gothic is utterly rife with such things and has been for centuries.
Such a fetishized persona might, then, read like bad fiction on paper but it emulates the fascist spectre as quite at home under Capitalism as having evolving out of older structures, while still having their medieval qualities that torture workers and benefit the powerful; i.e., the strongman as a brute working for the nearest centurion in a grander structure the operates through force and authorial decree: a medieval system that threatens abuse when the veil of propriety falls apart. The veil becomes black, menacing to those the system normally accommodates.
As with Neo-Gothic fiction, the ghost of the counterfeit presents the fabrication as caught between the history and the reality as half-real. As rapist personas, both Charlie and Le Gris play their parts, then, as the sexy-but-sexually frustrated looker [attractive and covetous] who feels owed sex within the state as in crisis. The fiction punches the designated bag as a partial critique, scapegoating the symptom but ignoring the cause to make the story thrilling [the Catholic Church as a den of criminals, in Radcliffe’s case; pre-fascism in the early Renaissance period, for Scott; and fascist as having never left, for Lurie]. While the commentary is there to breathe life into the voice of women, often these women are swept aside for the theatrics of the dueling men fighting over women as property to defend their image of themselves to the men who look up to them.
In turn, the people who critique these men—like Charlie’s employer or Le Gris’ rival—are themselves, imperfect; i.e., the “white knight” maneuver of someone who, if not overtly devilish, are waiting patiently in the wings for their “friend” to get hurt and then take advantage; or think they have “game” thus can pull off similar advances without being creepy themselves, while still expecting a reward from a false rescue during chercher la femme and staring at the talking woman as if the presumed property suddenly speaking were as miraculous as a statue weeping blood—e.g., Rebecca Watson’s “elevator gate” incident, where a man got in the elevator with her at four in the morning and propositioned sex to her on a whim [re: “Richard Dawkins Promotes Creationism,” timestamp: 5:03]. They—and the overblown, fascists-posturing as centrist, scientific “authorities” forcing people into a binary based on basic misunderstandings[1] about binary sex [again, Dawkins; Rebecca Watson’s “Richard Dawkins Doesn’t Know What a Woman Is,” 2021]—are harmful in a different way and generally to a lesser degree than the stereotypical highwayman, open fascist or rake.
In other words, they’re still knights, cowboys, cops, etc; i.e., traditionally male positions of power than are romanticized and given the benefit of the doubt by the audiences who conflate real-life versions with their fictional-counterparts; or grant the player of a fictional variant the authority and power of a real cop, priest or teacher as hauntologized to harmful, misleading extremes [Sergio Leone’s 1969 Once Upon a Time in the West starring Charles Bronson, a bigoted man playing a “good” brute/escalator of violence; versus his 1984 Once Upon a Time in America, starring Robert De Niro who plays a “good” brute framed as less shitty than James Woods’ character but still rapes a woman onscreen—exhibit 100c2c]. See: “Dark Shadows” for more on this topic, and on Radcliffe’s banditti at large.)
Gothic Communism, then, is a communal effort, dialectically addressing the material world’s current stigmas and biases in subversively medievalized/Gothic language. The aim in doing so is to think about transgenerational trauma in a sex-positive way that teaches emotional intelligence regarding sex pests as disconcertingly common and celebrated (above), even when their hauntology becomes openly criminal (exhibit 86a2). To this, thinking on one’s feet, or toes, occurs when having relationships with people—or artwork by, with or about people, including Gothic examples and oscillating, ambiguous arrangements inside and outside of the text. The point of empathy is to have caution for the person you’re empathizing with, who may be hyperviligent from past trauma and automatically no their toes in response to you doing normal activities with no trauma attached to your side of things: empathetic caution in respect to a victim’s caution, allowing you to form bonds, establish trust, and make artwork that can address the horrors and lies of Capitalism in a group effort.
However, Capitalism historically doesn’t incentivize these things, deprioritizing relationships where people talk about their feelings, treating sex workers as criminal and women as aliens, while boys don’t cry. The outcome of that particular social configuration are cis-het boys who have no idea how to talk to women on a pathological level. Instead, they hide their true intent and lack of game by trying to downplay their formulaic, lazy and inherently dishonest, even treacherous approach; e.g., Wooderson in exhibit 63b, above, emulated in real life by Ryan Evans’ auto-pilot pattern of self-described “awkwardness” (Quelsee, 2023) when serially harassing women online and in person of increasingly younger ages than himself (ibid.); or weird canonical nerds like Caleb Hart saying they “aren’t a rapist” (exhibit 93b)—it’s feigned innocence/nonchalance, even a deliberate, forceful[2] weirdness; i.e., of acknowledging one’s approach as “coming on too strong” before denying it in the same breath. Thanks to Capitalism, such persons become blind to the correct way to talk to others—as equals. Instead, they grow into bad players who target younger and younger girls, becoming increasingly entitled, ignorant, pampered and cruel towards those they’re conditioned to regard as literally inhuman, but also fetishized (the structures that perform these rituals outlined in Chapter Two; their consequences explored for the rest of the book).
Trauma that must be handled with care. Likewise, canonical interrogation and iconoclastic praxis must be handled with respect towards the victims. With that in mind, let’s re-examine the above picture again, this time through a critically empathetic, sex-positive lens. The picture is of actress Sean Young playing a replicant (a robotic slave designed to look human). She’s not only smoking a cigarette in the photograph; she’s doing it while taking a test to verify that she’s human. If she fails the test, that means she isn’t human, thus open to on-the-spot execution (called “retirement” in the movie, a cryptonym that disguises corporate abuse, which itself is housed inside her temple-like office with the artificial owl and the reptilian male overload, all displaced, hauntological cryptonyms for Capitalism). Not only is this treatment perfectly legal; her rights and her body belong to the company that made her, the Tyrell Corporation. This idea is what drives carceral hauntologies—the duplicate as an “authentic” replica that completely ignores the woman posing for it. She and her abuses are swept under the rug and forgotten.
(artist: Ilya Kuvshinov)
The picture of the cigarette doesn’t explicitly say any of this by itself. Nor can it comment on how its hypercanonical[3] status leads to pastiche in perpetuity (the tech-noir/cyberpunk as the end-point of commentary about the world, echoing Fisher’s take on hauntology). This endless pursuit of profit-through-pastiche demands normalized behaviors that can be repeatedly administered to audiences, the latter conditioned to recognize value in prescribed sexual roles (which tend to conflate biological sex and gender performance/identity): Marx’s Superstructure and Base. As we’ll see in just a moment, this Capitalist framework specifically discourages mutual consent in the workplace, but also empathy towards workers who represent the workplace through art (or vice versa) that tends to shape how either is portrayed and viewed—in short, how it’s empathized with as taught by hauntological forms.
As a workplace representative, Sean remains the central product of the company. “More human than human,” she’s a manmade secretary reduced to feeling artificial because she knows she’s a product (with a four-year lifespan, no less). The reoccurring problem, then, is context, but also bias: How are women viewed whether context is absent or no. Sean Young’s treatment as an actor highlights social-sexual bias relative to her imagery in art; i.e., “woman is other,” hence unwelcome in art save as Patriarchal Capitalism demands—xenophobic subjugation. Since her performance is easily divorced from the text but not the image, determining if either conveys mutual consent in a sex-positive sense will require viewing Sean as a subject, not an object in a picture that sells merchandise. She’s someone to listen to, not dismiss, ignore or attack, but still being judged by bigots who view her as a monster, a madwoman in the attic.
Though Sean personally recounts abysmal treatment on and off set precisely because she was a 22-year old woman working with much older, sexist men (“Blade Runner‘s Sean Young: ‘If I were a man I’d have been treated better,'” 2015), it’s disarmingly easy to look at Sean’s character being abused onscreen and think, “It’s just a movie, right?” It becomes far more dubious when we consider both side-by-side. Not only did Ridley Scott and his team film everything without Sean’s consent—indeed, despite her active, on-set complaints about sexual harassment—they released Blade Runner without reshooting anything: a classic movie that flagrantly depicts the very abuse Sean described, only to be lauded as canon whose hauntology yields carceral outcomes inside the minds of sexist fans who unironically defend Capitalism.
This treatment by a supposed ally like Scott (who doesn’t get a pass just because he made Alien) marked an abusive trend that would haunt Sean for the rest of her career. She would go on to be ignored, distrusted precisely for speaking the truth. Empathy towards her victimized position demonstrates mutual consent was not present. This goes to show how the context highlighting mutual consent must be explained, but also believed in regards to one’s own testimony about abuse experienced in the workplace. Under Capitalism, the workplace is everywhere, and it creates a generational “cone of silence” regarding workplace abuses of various kinds. This includes abuses committed against female workers by male superiors, even “fatherly” types like Bill Cosby (Dreading, 2023) who “took advantage” (quiet part: he drugged and raped them) of female workers infantilized by the system. It also includes literal child abuse and a great number of other abuse types/scenarios functioning in a similar cryptonymic fashion: “It just wasn’t talked about back then” (re: exhibit 11b5, “Challenging the State“).
In turn, this already-inconvenient truth would hide something larger behind it: “Most abusers are workers that people perceive as family members—authority figures like police officers (or people impersonating police officers); sports figures like coaches and star athletes; religions figures and celebrities in general.” This exhibit, if exposed, would hide something behind it, the thing that no one talks about that causes all of them: Patriarchal Capitalism. Sometimes, an elaborate strategy of misdirection is called for, evoking the ghost of the counterfeit through Gothic displacement: the old lord chasing the Gothic maiden around the dark spooky castle.
Iconoclastic “monster misdirection” strategies can be a movie to watch with fresh eyes; or, it can happen through our own relationships as we play the dark lord or lady through unequal power exchange, introducing mutual consent back into the ritual. This includes consent-non-consent, which can be quite fun and cathartic with a game, playful negotiator (thank you for that, Cuwu): rape fantasies, mask-like roleplays and revisiting past trauma within playful boundaries of control that minimize risk; e.g., taking drugs to fall asleep (re: exhibit 11b2 and exhibit 51d3, “Challenging the State” and “Dark Xenophilia“), deliberately performing like a doll in figurative or literal ways (exhibit 41g2, “Understanding Vampires“), or otherwise emulating the “swooning” function of vampirism (exhibit 87d) during sex.
(artists: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard; source: “Dark Shadows”)
While this sounds sinister, it’s actually quite common. While it’s performed to address vulnerability as something to cope with and appreciate, it can also be entirely unrelated to trauma; i.e., fucking someone while they are asleep (regardless if the ritual is Gothicized for appreciative peril; e.g., Eddie Money’s “I Think I’m In Love,” 1982). Many partners have that talk with their partner(s)—”Sure, you can fuck me before you go to work while I’m still asleep! Just no surprise anal and don’t cum in my hair!” In BDSM parlance, that’s called negotiation—a concept mysterious to many couples on account that BDSM and the understanding of healthy power exchange is canonically abjected, replaced with heteronormative prescription that disempowers women, erases queer/ace people, demonizes people of color and disabled people, and compels men to act like dickheads, etc. At the end of the day, it’s mutual consent that’s being reinforced/recognized as sexy (which includes the written BDSM, an implement designed to protect both sides in case something goes awry—accidents can happen).
Monsters, whether good or bad, are made through oppositional praxis as a living socio-material thing over time (whose history we explored in Volume Two). This includes complicit/revolutionary “beards,” as Juul might call intended/emergent gameplay. In a state of constant flux, oppositional metaplay continuously alters the way the game is played for or against the status quo—bourgeois beards or proletarian beards, etc. Sometimes literal but often figurative, the beard is a “grooming” process—how one styles their appearance and social-sexual customs as things to present, but also interpret and enforce or encourage in society at large. State agents or actors adopt the state’s Symbolic Order—fetishized muscles, body hair and attitudes about heteronormative sex work as dimorphic: Men are strong and women are weak, but men—as “intelligent” and “powerful” as they are—need sex from women because otherwise the world stops turning. So if Price and Quinnvincible (re: exhibit 52g2, “Furry Panic“) are abjected for displaying their literal beards and figurative “beards,” reverse abjection is the praxial, xenophilic decolonization of these things in favor of a Communist world: a Utopian, “perfect world” for all workers where AFABs can walk around, fuzzy and clothed as little or as much as they want—can do so without it being perceived as “sass” or “back talk”—without fear of violence, judgement, shaming or rape, like a dog being put to heel, “bitch-slapped,” etc. Like Trans-X’s purple painted skies and computer fairyland, it’s the dream they make real.
This reification happens by gradually introducing emergent social-sexual code into the half-real gaming space, teaching “gym/gamer bros” and other weird canonical nerds to be better “gamers” in the mysterious ways of sex, love and gender. But iconoclast must first talk back/fight back as girls/queer people historically do—through gender trouble, thus fight like girls, talk like girls, historically doing so in increasingly revolutionary ways that slowly become active—from Sappho to Radcliffe to O’Keefe (re: exhibit 24c1, “The Basics of Oppositional Synthesis“) to Butler to Quinnvincible—as “ferocious” as killer rabbits that terrify emotionally fragile. The aim is not to shatter all men, but over time use iconoclastic negotiation as a form of collective worker action that “fuck” men’s menticided brains with fresh, helpful spunk—to, as Mavis put it to me, “unbitch the bitch”; i.e., not “discipline and punish,” but “good play” of the puppy-play sort (as much as I detest Scrappy Doo, “puppy power!” is apposite here). Our target, then, is white (cis-het) male fragility as something that can extend beyond male nerds, affecting women/feminists, people of color and queer persons through various compromises with power (we’ll examine these compromises bad play in Chapters Three and Four, as well as how to counterplay them in Chapter Five).
Despite all these mixed metaphors, the common theme is emotional intelligence and mutual consent as something to convey through one’s social-sex life, but also one’s art as a lifestyle extension of these things. In xenophilic terms, furries and otherkin are not automatically rapists any more than gay men are intrinsic vectors for venereal disease; trans people, natural-born pedophiles; or women, “gold-digging sluts.” That’s a scapegoating mindset, generally conveyed by xenophobic defenders of the state blaming the victim (we’ll get to that). The xenophile should draft their own fearsome “gargoyles” to oppose their canonical doubles with, but also provide parallel spaces those gargoyles call home and liminal variants (exhibits 64a/64b). The idea of rebellion is guerilla warfare, fighting back in ways that work, that tire or confuse our opponents; i.e., by snapping them out of their canonical mindset at the cultural level. This includes becoming the killer rabbit that powerful men fear. As such, consider my xenophile’s refrain: Suck what you must suck and shake your booty—your thick, revolutionary monster booty! “Fuck them like an animal” by illustrating mutual consent and worker rights that teach “good play” BDSM as a stabilizing gossip, perceptive pastiche, and disarmingly constructive anger that subversively teaches workers to resist the state and it’s endless nightmare of manufacture, subterfuge and coercion (the bourgeois three trifectas from Volume One; re: “The Nation-State“).
Note: When originally writing Volume Three back in 2022 and early 2023, Meowing from Hell hadn’t outed themselves as transphobic[4]. Also, at this point I was still writing Sex Positivity on Blogger [which wasn’t censoring softcore nudity at this point] and hadn’t transitioned over to Word, yet; i.e., exhibits featuring hardcore nudity have been censored with Pikachus, eggplants and ducks:
(exhibit 64a: The iconoclastic monster/gargoyle/egregore, etc. Model and artist, left: Meowing from Hell and Persephone van der Waard, top and bottom. Right: promo banner designed by Meowing from Hell [now removed]. The iconoclastic “gargoyle” shares the borrowed language of canonical variants, but uses it in sex-positive depictions. These are often housed in geometrically “terrifying” locales, often with hauntological elements [exhibit 64b] or dream-like, “phantasmagorical” qualities—i.e., parallel spaces that can terrifying in canonical or iconoclastic ways [exhibit 64c].)
In Gothic language, iconoclastic praxis playfully and emergently reveals is the same old thing everyone knows is already there: the man behind the curtain. Marxist criticism of that man reveals him to own the means of production, have tremendous wealth and privilege, have some sense of celebrity status or position of authority and power, and control the media enough to cultivate people’s views about him. There’s no way anyone with a modicum of remorse could examine him so nakedly before swiftly seeing him as an abusive monster. So, the game becomes one of perpetual concealment (and literal inability to “reflect,” har-har): Conceal your means, motive and opportunity by making up stories and twisting the narrative; bribe and coerce the people you work for by having power over them; and when all else fails, hire a good lawyer and deny, deny, deny.
A common consequence is public denial, a fear of speaking out against authority figures or viewing let alone conveying dreadful things. For instance, the concealing trope of female swooning is part of Radcliffe’s “armor by fainting” procedure (re: exhibit 30c, “Rape Culture“; which plays out quite literally in Alien, for example, when Lambert the white, cis-het damsel freezes and is raped, off-screen; conversely the heroine Ripley defends herself from the same cosmic rapist, putting on a white suit of actual armor to protect her virtue; refer to the “Reversing Abjection” section from this chapter). Ostensibly this protect her modesty from the rapist villain—itself a literal metaphor for not being raped—but also figuratively from the judgmental audience and public when she acts like a man to defend herself and her place within a larger way of life. This general-to-specific cryptonymic phenomena showcases how canon plays a disproportionate role in what goes unexplained, including what is or isn’t believed by victims trying to tell their side of things (who, during the making of sanctioned hauntologies, tend to threaten corporate profits by blowing the whistle). Gothic stories that defend Capitalism (especially older stories written by cis-white men or women) may cursorily address this issue, but very quickly will “bury” them again by killing a “bad apple” scapegoat, often a demonic one displaced from systems of abuse. By comparison, emancipatory hauntologies expose the abuse to frankly denuding, even invasive extremes—even “going undercover” and telling the story from the abuser’s point of view if it means highlighting the systemic nature of things. In other words, no swooning allowed!
Doing so will “haunt” the whistleblower, who Capitalism will punish without mercy. This trend affects not just the character, but the actor playing them. For example, this real-life beach photograph lacks the same amount of context as Sean’s set photo. It nevertheless shows someone generally recognized for her outbursts and eventual exile from Hollywood, with empathy towards Sean generally being discouraged by official narratives that unfairly portray her as an unprofessional, lippy harridan. This stems from sexist critics who refuse to see Sean as a victim at all—not a woman abused by a sexist system until she got mad, but a crazy lady’s “comeuppance,” a criminal whose treatment is justified, legitimate, and without question.
(source)
Mutual consent is a natural right that Sean always had, one her abusers violated on multiple levels; it goes unexplained by and to her attackers, who continually refuse to believe her as time goes on but are also framed as her “protectors” (a thoroughly derivative cryptonym that hides Patriarchal sexism behind various forms of “male savior” pastiche, framing the man as a hauntological protector and the woman as a “damsel-in-distress” trophy—in retro-future replicas like Heavy Metal versus The Fifth Element [1981, 1997—Major Grin, 2023] and too many fantasy-style stories to even list: books and movies, but especially videogames[5] that sexualize women even when they aren’t passive sex objects for heroes to “get”; it also defends the status quo that produces these socio-material, heteronormative arrangements—Lacan’s Symbolic Order). A far more useful deterrent in future abuse than a “knight”-in-shining-armor is the empathy required to listen when something bad happens. Strong men—be they bodybuilders, private eyes, or billionaires dressed up in bat suits—can’t protect women from systemic abuse because they don’t do anything to change the system itself, which historio-materially blames women and sets them up to be sacrificed to men by men.
That’s where activism comes in. As sex-positive activists, we shouldn’t blame Sean for being upset, but try to understand her plight to begin with by examining her photos through an empathic lens that lets her finally speak for herself (what Paulo Freire coined as “the pedagogy of the oppressed,” a concept we’ll return to in Chapter Four); furthermore, that her complex, life-long struggles demonstrate the importance of context when interpreting something as inherently colonized as sexual imagery.
Women, whether cis or trans, are historically sexualized without their consent, denied empathy from an audience who worships (defends) male power. Recognition of this perennial tragedy requires an active, informed viewer—someone who doesn’t just take things at face value, but thinks about how sexualized images intersect inside a larger, biased system that romanticizes a decaying past as the end-all, be-all. Those who think for themselves can supply others with the same cooperative tools—punching up against a system that only punches down, forcing its subjects to compete against one another. This system must be actively resisted. Active viewer. Active reader. Active artist. Activism in hauntological gargoyles (exhibit 54 [re: “Furry Panic“], 64a, etc) and hauntological parallel spaces (exhibit 64b) stemming from liminal variants (exhibit 64c)—all are proletarian praxis and transformative, collective teamwork. This is fostered between people learning from art, of art of art, of paintings but also videogames as animating the Gothic through ludo-Gothic poetics as a form of proletarian de facto education:
(exhibit 64b: Artist, top: Persephone van der Waard; bottom: Edward Hooper. My piece was not only made to be hauntological; it was pointedly based off Hooper’s voyeuristic, vacant work, combining the seminal “Nighthawks” [1942] with an eclectic cast of misfits: myself [two days before I came out of the closet], my mother and Jim Morrison, but also two antiheroes from two of my mother’s favorite series: Rupert Campbell Black and Cass Neary.)
(exhibit 64c [from Volume Two]: Aguirre’s aforementioned geometries of terror, presented with a wide corpus of texts and their liminal spaces from different mediums: Top-far-left: The Nostromo’s exterior, from Alien; middle-far-left: Rugrats episode “In the Dreamtime,” 1993—horror being a common theme through the whole Rugrats series; bottom-far-left: The Witch’s House, 2012; middle-left descending strip: Little Nightmares 2, 2021; middle descending strip: scenes from Coraline, 2009, and Inside, 2016; middle-right descending strip: scenes from Among the Sleep, 2014; far-right descending strip: the Nostromo interior from Alien; bottom horizontal strip: scenes and locations from the 2017 Metroidvania, Hollow Knight.
All these texts explore liminal parallel spaces as ambiguously Gothic—with monstrous hauntologies, concentric nightmares, and uncanny inhabitants that intimate a re-remembered “return” to a reimagined childhood. Not only is this lost childhood imperfect; it is replete with abusive intimations that generally convey regression through fantasies of paradoxical danger and rape fantasies tied to chronotopic power structures: “a fearful inheritance tied to an ancestral location loaded with decaying, heavy time,” to paraphrase from David Punter’s definition of a Gothic tale [or Baldrick’s]. Seeing as I can’t find the exact quote [academia, especially British Gothic academia, paywalls everything in sight] this quote from James Watts’ Contesting the Gothic: Fiction, Genre and Cultural Conflict [1999] does the trick:
In a period of industrialization and rapid social change, according to Punter, Gothic works insistently betrayed the fears and anxieties of the middle classes about the nature of their ascendancy, returning to the issues of ancestry, inheritance, and the transmission of property: “Under such circumstances, it is hardly surprising to find the emergence of a literature whose key motifs are paranoia, manipulation and injustice, and whose central project is understanding the inexplicable, the taboo, the irrational,” (source: “Gothic Definitions,” 2021).
I think Punter is definitely more overtly psychoanalytical than Marxist most of the time [source: “Punter Notes on Gothic” from The Literature of Terror] but I still enjoy his analytical approach sometimes. As for my own thoughts on such spaces [from Volume Two]: the aim is to expose past traumas related to state abuse, but also to fuck with the player as someone seeking agency within these spaces by negotiating with the game; e.g., Metroidvania, but also games like The Witch’s House.
[artist: Smolb]
Simply put, fucking is fun, but it takes many different forms, including BDSM as asexual. In either game, the gameplay is based on mastery of the player “forced” to submit in different forms without bringing overt sex into the equation [merely echoes of it]; while Metroidvania are ludic and learn into ludo-Gothic themes of dominating the player mid-execution, the cinematic nature of The Witch’s House yields a more orthographic/cinematic twist that stubbornly resists player dominion. Courtesy of Bakhtin, the castle and its endless dynasty of power exchange have thematic primacy—i.e., the fear of inheriting one’s role in a larger destructive cycle that relegates the hero to a lonely doom in within the interminable stone corridors of a hungry tomb (that literally has their name on it). As I write in, “Our Ludic Masters”:
Metroidvania players consent to the game by adopting a submissive position. Most people sexualize BDSM, but power is exchanged in any scenario, sexual or otherwise. This being said, Gothic power exchanges are often sexualized. Samus is vulnerable when denuded, her naked body exposed to the hostile alien menace (re: the end scene from Alien). Metroidvania conjure dominance and submission through a player that winds up “on the hip” (an old expression that means “to be at a disadvantage”). Another way to think of it is, the player is the bottom, and they’re being topped by the game.
[…] A person motivated by sex is hardly in control. Not to mention, the sex historically offered by Metroid is fraught with peril. The entire drive is illustrated by gameplay conducive to speedrunning at a basic level. The same strategies employed by the best runners are executed by regular players. You play the game and begin to play it faster. In some sense, this “maze mastery” is involuntary. The player cannot help but play the game faster as they begin to re-remember the maze. The game exploits this, repeatedly leading the player towards self-destruction and domination.
These feelings are orgasmic, but differently than the Doom Slayer’s own attempts at conquest. They’re a Gothic orgasm, a kind of exquisite torture. I say “exquisite” because they occur within the realm of play [which grants them asexual elements]. For Metroidvania, this jouissance is ludic. But sometimes a game can blur the lines. Though not a Metroidvania, the RPG Maker game The Witch’s House remains a salient example.
You play as Viola, a young girl visiting her mysterious friend’s spooky house. Inside the titular house, the player can learn its rules, thus explore the gameworld. This inexorable progression is inevitably doomed, the outcome heinous no matter the player or their skill. Like Charlotte Dacre’s titanic Zofloya providing Victoria with poison, the game lends the player the instruments for their own demise[: the sword for the Roman fool to fall upon]. Tenacious players are even promised a “best” ending if they “master” the game, beating it without dying. The game only doubles down, punishing the player with virtually the same ending. / This ending is about as brutal as they come. Even so, such players will have beaten the game already and know the ending—if not it, then games with a similar outcome (re: self-destruction). Players are expected to revel in the game’s sadism, deriving pleasure from “punishment” while the game, for lack of a better term, bends them over and fucks them (source).
[artist: Yune Kagesaki]
Just as the Gothic often takes an asexual approach to sex [which we’ll explore more of in Chapter Three], “fucking” isn’t literal, but yields many different applications within monstrous power exchange as a fun activity. It’s fun to fuck with people, especially when they’re in on the performance to some extent [though perhaps only to a degree]. Whatever surprises, deceptions and “fucking” do occur happen relative to fearful spaces occupied with concerns about imposters, but especially a tyrannical past’s “return.” While Giddings and Kennedy’s “Little Jesuses and *@#?-off Robots” touches on a game’s mastering of players, “allowing progression through the game only if the players recognize what they are being prompted to do, and comply with these coded instructions,” players can fight back; yet, this is proposition is, as I have stated, more of a compromise or negotiation between the player and the game:
I can watch other people try to master the game, and watch them be dominated by the space. Not even speedrunners can escape this embarrassment, their blushing faces conjoined with the statues already screaming on the walls. How fleeting a victory like Shiny Zeni’s is, when it will eventually be bested. Or buried [ibid.].
To use a BDSM term, some games are clearly more “strict” than others. Yet the ludo-BDSM arrangements outlined above are ultimately cathartic because they occur as part of an informed exchange in regards to one’s own trauma and agency going hand-in-hand with Gothic poetics; re: ludo-Gothic BDSM. In sex-positive realms, then submission is more powerful than domination because the game cannot be played without the sub’s permission. Barring someone holding a gun to your head, there is always a choice.)
Activating empathy is only part of proletarian praxis’ larger operation. Informed consumption/critical awareness remain just as vital, whose ability to recognize performative nuance within sexualized artwork necessitates iconoclastic, de facto educators—comedians, artists, critics and models—to re-educate consumers, teaching them to punch up through their own imaginary intake and output: parody and parallel spaces/Superstructure (exhibit 64b/64c) and the sex-positive monsters inside running countercurrent to canonical historical-material victims, scapegoats or class traitors/minority police (exhibit 71). We’ll examine the emancipatory hauntology of these ideas next, before tying them to descriptive sexuality in the following subsections (and cultural appreciation in Chapter Three).
(artist: Harmony Corrupted)
Onto “Informed (Ironic) Consumption and De Facto Educators“!
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!
Footnotes
[1] Biological sex is not descriptively binary but is prescribed as such; i.e., heteronormativity forces a colonial binary into society as a social construct:
Assigned sex is the label given at birth by medical professionals based on an individual’s chromosomes, hormone levels, sex organs, and secondary sex characteristics. As a note, the term “biologic sex” is understood by many to be an outdated term, due to its longstanding history of being used to invalidate the authenticity of trans identities. Although sex is typically misconceptualized as a binary of male (XY) or female (XX), many other chromosomal arrangements, inherent variations in gene expression patterns, and hormone levels exist. Intersex categorizations include variations in chromosomes present, external genitalia, gonads (testes or ovaries), hormone production, hormone responsiveness, and internal reproductive organs (source: National Library of Medicine).
The essentializing occurs, then, between the romancing of fantasy and the “fantasy” of science as part of a larger set of cultural biases that harm anyone who isn’t cis, but also cis people who will be effected by the enforcement of the status quo until it enters crisis.
Note: For additional terms on gender, refer to the gender studies terminology I list and summarize in “Audience, Art and Reading Order.” From that list, I want you to understand that my own analyzing of said terms is very much as a fourth wave an-Com GNC feminist, having modified my own understanding from 2023 onwards; re (from the footnote to “heterosexuality,” written by me):
Traditional orientation terminology is classically binarized, which GNC usage complicates by introducing non-binary potential. Traditional usage ties a specific orientation to sexuality—e.g., heterosexual—but descriptive orientation can just as much involve an emotional and/or romantic attraction and generally includes gender and biology as interrelating back and forth while not being essentially connected. So whereas heteronormativity forces sex and gender together and ties both to human biology as the ultimate deciding factor regarding one’s gender and orientation, sex-positive usage is far more flexible; orientation isn’t strictly sexual or rooted in biology at all. Those variables are present, but neither is the end-all, be-all because sexuality and gender are things to self-determine versus things the state determines for us (to exploit workers through binarized stratagems; e.g., “women’s work”). To compensate for this flexibility inside GNC circles, orientation labels are generally shorted to “hetero,” “bi,” or “pan” (homosexual is commonly referred to as “gay” or “[a] lesbian”), allowing for asexual implications. Even so, classically binary terms like “hetero” and “homo” tend to be used more sparingly and are often swapped out for more specific identities or umbrella terms; e.g., “I’m queer/gay” or “I’m bi” as something to understand with some degree of intuition, which can later be explored in future conversations if the parties in question are interested in pursuing it. This pursuit is not automatic, though, so neither is the language denoting what can be pursued; instead, sexuality is an option, not a given (ibid.)
[2] It’s entirely possible to default to weirdness by being oneself as a successful, ethical dating stratagem. Indeed, my fawning cuteness and catboy voice caught them off guard, leading them to say, “This guy’s weird as hell—I like it!” We’ll examine my self-admitted weirdness more in Chapter Three when we examine goblins (exhibit 94c1).
[3] The imagery from Blade Runner is so famous that you might recognize it without having seen the film at all. Many do, with many more defending its usage in the blank neoliberal sense: as a cryptic shroud that cloaks Capitalisms’ abusive past, present and future behind endless, uncritical copies. While Scott’s dystopia allowed for neoliberal critique—engaging with the Tyrell corporation as a larger foe—increasingly corporatized copies of the same base cityscape have leaned into the “dumb playground” aspect. When new generations see the image, that’s what they’ll think of, not Scott’s palimpsest.
[4] I write about this in Meowing’s bad review, which I wrote a week or so ago after not speaking about them since the transphobic event happened:
Meowing from Hell—aka Cat—loves artwork, including being drawn (above; re: the drawings I did of Meowing in 2022 and 2023, alongside the ref material they supplied, at the time). They initially supported my endeavors, promoting my work in exchange for being drawn. We worked from August 2022 to May 2023, no problems, exchanging artwork and money for premade b/g content, promotional material and time on Meowing’s Twitter feed. On May 23rd, I reached out to them regarding a widespread transmisogynistic campaign against me; re: “Setting the Record Straight, Transmisia Experience: 5/26/2023“; i.e., despite me approaching all other sex workers the same way and doing sex work myself, I was being accused of not respecting the boundaries of others or knowing what consent was (the usual transmisogynistic accusations; re: the man in a dress/women’s spaces). Rather than hear me out, Meowing proceeding to gaslight me and try and convince me that what I had done regarding the accusers was wrong… despite it being the same exact behavior I had done with Meowing (nudity in the OnlyFans screencaps censored, to be on the safe side; nudity in the Twitter screencaps has not been censored):
In short, Meowing threw me under the bus and washed their hands of things (click here for the full image of our pre-conflict August 2022 conversation and here for our full May 2023 conversation). Furthermore, they still do sex work:
Despite this, they distanced themselves from me and refused to promote my work on the word of other transphobic sex workers, which makes them transphobic, too. They frankly suck.
[5] As I write in “Borrowed Robes: The Role of ‘Chosen’ Clothing — Part 1: Female Videogame Characters” (2020), videogame women, even active avatars the player can control, are historically “dressed” in skimpy outfits chosen by men or at least in service of men:
This two-part series examines the historical lack of choice regarding character appearance in videogames—namely clothes. […] When I write “clothes,” I mean in the literal sense, but also the character’s total onscreen appearance—their physique, dialogue, move set, etc. For women, such personas seldom represent actual female desires—either of the character, or any women who controls her. Instead, they represent how women are controlled by their male peers through the forced assignment of clothes that sexualize women in unfavorable ways (source).
This appropriation of “empowerment” tends to appropriate the celebration of women as an older topos (a traditional theme or formula in literature): the topos of the power of women (e.g., Susan Smith, 1995) specifically sex as a female-exclusive power in the face of masculine authority. This ancient concept dates back to the time of the Greeks and—e.g., Daphne—generally conceals a rapacious element; in doing so, it announce the larger systemic sexism issues through the female body itself as a cryptonym, overshadowed by the fact that this power is really just subservience and pacification in disguise.
