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.

Reversing Abjection: Describing Sexuality vs Prescribing Sexual Modesty (feat. Alien)

Many men have a tendency to divide “love” into two components: an affectionate (and asexual) element; and a passionate (sexual) element. Furthermore, since the areas of affectionate and sexual love are fraught with complex emotions of guilt and anger, many men manage these difficult and (to their way of thinking) dangerous feelings by projecting them onto the women about them. Thus, through this process of projection, men may perceive the world as a place inhabited by two kinds of women: “good” women whom they idealize and who have no sensual desires (and for whom, of course, the men themselves feel no sexual longings); and “bad” women who are sexual by nature (and with whom it is permissible-perhaps even expected-to have sexual relations). This imaginative construct has come to be called the “Virgin/Whore” syndrome (source).

—Cynthia Griffin Wolff, “The Radcliffean Gothic Model” (1979)

(artist: Frau Haku)

We’ll return to Wolff and Radcliffe’s imperiled detectives much, much more in the Demon Module (e.g., “The Puzzle of “Antiquity” but also the entirety of “Exploring the Derelict Past“). Here, reversing abjection is a super important idea—effectively synonymous to reversing profit during the whore’s revenge/ludo-Gothic BDSM, “on the Aegis.” While “On Giving Birth” from my PhD would cement reverse abjection as something to explore more in Volume One and Two (re: “Everything sits within a cycle of imaginary history that plays out through an endless, genocidal mirroring that must, if it is to cease, be met with mirrors”), here is where the idea actually started. —Perse, 4/22/2025

Picking up where “Informed (Ironic) Consumption and De Facto Educators” left off…

In Volume Two, we examined the history of abjection within the Gothic; i.e., the Medusa as the ghost of the counterfeit, thus felt more and more as an emerging mode of monstrous-poetic discourse along Capitalism’s own emergence onto the world stage (re: “Vampire Capitalism”). I want to return to abjection as something to consider when generating our own creative successes during oppositional praxis under late-stage, neoliberal Capitalism; re: by hugging the alien/nature as monstrous-feminine as something that has been sold to us as “unhuggable” during the dialectic of the alien (re: “Some Prep When Hugging the Alien,” 2024).

As a precursor to those ideas, this piece explores simply reversing abjection, period (refer to my 2025 Metroidvania Corpus to see my full extensive body of work on the Alien franchise). To it, we’ll examine Alien yet again, using it as a popular staging point when thinking about how factors of sex positivity like descriptive sexuality are opposed by their heteronormative foils.

First, a mild refresher before we proceed: If abjection is a system of division that creates canonically demonic scapegoats, reverse abjection confronts their persecutors by subverting the language and the process into something more xenophilic than it was previously. By shaming the competitive nature of reactionary aggression, social-sexual activism aims to unify workers against Capitalism through cooperative measures: to imagine symbolic arrangements that undermine the status quo, whose bourgeois Superstructure abjects descriptive sexuality—how people choose to express themselves regardless of heteronormative rules, restrictions and omissions. Canonical abjection occurs through reactionary countermeasures that rely on heightened aggression to justify official (and stochastic) reprisals. By essentializing problematic sexuality through canon, the elite commodify moral panic in defense of sexual modesty; re: the conspicuously white, straight Radcliffean heroine threatened by dark rape as the go-to reactionary approach, celebrating the ghost of the counterfeit as “flavor” to spice up a Gothic jaunt: “Threats of ‘rape’ are part of the fun!”

Again, we’ll dissect and salvage Radcliffe in another book (re: “Radcliffe’s Refrain,” “Non-Magical Detectives,” “Dissecting Radcliffe” and “In Measured Praise of the Great Enchantress“). Here, we’re only isolating the reversal of abjection, period. For the rest of the subsection, then we’ll explore Radcliffe’s modesty dilemma in the 1979 horror movie, Alien: something to prescribe in reactionary fashion by presenting itself as hauntologically “under attack” by abject sexuality (namely the pure-white virgin threatened by a pitch-black attacker). Then, we’ll consider it’s broader relationship to proletarian praxis—not just abjection, but chronotopes, hauntology and cryptonymy as a colonized historio-material process that must be examined, recognized, and rebelled against using covertly clever countermeasures.

To be clear, abjection covers a wide range of topics besides just sexuality (social or political xenophobia, gerontophobia, etc). However, sexuality tends to intersect with all of them at various points. This mutability permits numerous interpretations when it comes to monsters, which—through the language of fear in powerful hands—function as compelled signifiers that regulate sex as a controlled substance. This hauntological role can be reversed while still being contested by both sides inside an ongoing linguo-material exchange.

(artist: Lord Mishkin)

Take Giger’s famous creature: Classic moral panic denotes it as a cosmic rapist/rape cryptonym, itching to peel away Ripley’s pale armor (of the Radcliffean, European-supremacist sort) with its dark claws during the liminal hauntology of war (the chronotope). However, a famous feminist counterexample turns Enlightenment misogyny against itself: the Archaic Mother. Less of an explicit argument and more of a vague, nebulous symbol whose social-politic stance can be interpreted in vastly different ways, the Archaic Mother is commonplace in Gothic fiction. Alien portrays the monster (an egg-laying parasite) as female and ancient, but also mightier than mankind. A kind of “wandering womb,” this murderous, hysterical entity sits closer to the primordial cycle of life and death: sexual reproduction as entirely irrational, emotional and animal, but also parthenogenetic (not requiring a male mate). Personifying this process, the monster actually challenges Patriarchal hegemony by appearing as its oldest, greatest bogeywoman inside a womb-like space, or a space to make womb-like: queen bitch of the universe (who Ripley would defeat in the Americanized sequel, Aliens, 1986).

In either case, Gothic performance invokes abjection within an oscillating dialogue about sex and gender made through borrowed terms: scary rape fear (Jameson’s class nightmare; re: Postmodernism) appears, which the token warrior nun fears and exorcises through exposure and force (re: the whore’s paradox). While the elite canonize descriptive sex (acts not tied exclusively to biological reproduction and patrilineal descent) as vacuously hideous (framing them as disposable pastiche that anyone can consume), sex-positive workers reverse this “gag reflex” as a moral position within the same overarching conversation: sex purely for pleasure, but also liberation from outdated, coercive norms that celebrate the troubling toleration of hidden barbarity as something to celebrate as “zesty!”

The larger, warring dialogue actually invokes positive and negative feelings (attraction and repulsion) through ambivalent, liminal markers: the monster, the woman, the castle, the blood sacrifice as hauntologically summoned. Yes, they historically convey cultural anxieties and phobias regarding sexuality and the human body as classically forbidden, but they needn’t have to be. Instead, cordoning them off is an attempt to prevent their study by proponents of Capitalism, who use sex-coercive doubles of these things to generate coercive fear that maintains the current order of things: carceral hauntology and consent towards its imprisoning worldview as cryptonymically manufactured in times of constant impending crisis—tremendous, obfuscating distractions, in other words.

Hauntology—especially under Capitalism—is fractally recursive, a creature of chaos whose many-different incarnations spring from specific material factors relating back and forth from moment to moment. This leads to different hauntology types, and many “different” near-plagiarizations whose traced, uncertain lineage constitutes a singular hauntological type.

(exhibit 66: Artist, right: Frank Frazetta; source, left—note: The similarities between the box art for Castlevania, 1986, and Frazetta are hard to ignore, but also part of a common practice in the 1980s and ’90s [source: Arcade Sushi’s “25 Stolen Images in Video Games, 2016] that saw videogame designers blatantly ripping off movie posters and production stills left and right. Nevertheless, the mysterious artist for Konami’s original box design continues to go uncredited. Within this scheme, the role of the hero is a flexible one: the white knight versus the black knight, the black knight as romanticized in a toxic criminal hauntology, the man facing the ghost of the Numinous, or the crusader attacking the degenerate; etc. And all of it a necromantic dance within the ruins that furthers the monomyth as a legitimate form of state violence that can be reclaimed, but just as often isn’t.)

One such type is liminal hauntology. We’ve already discussed liminality and hauntology separately in Volumes One and Two. However, as the companion glossary stipulated, liminal spaces—in architectural terms—are designed to be passed through. The same is true inside Neo-Gothic architecture and its colossal wrecks/chronotopes (exhibit 5c, 5d, 64c). However, the effect is anisotropic; re: different per direction traveled when examined through a bourgeois or a proletarian lens. Advertised by empty-like museums that denote a reimagined barbaric past, the Gothic chronotope is something to visit and experience that, when moved through, communicates various signature emotions tied to the underworld, its presence felt by nebulous, imprecise markers and tremendous feelings beyond everyday existence. In short, liminal hauntologies are visited, generally after being dug up and reassembled; re: Jameson’s “archaeologies,” they’re visitors from the reimagined past, thresholds that arrive. For our purposes, they are regular symptoms of Capitalism-in-crisis, whereupon the dividing membranes become thin, transparent and fragile, and through which the ghost of the counterfeit may be felt and demands for something better potentially be made.

I say “potentially” because such demands must be made in the presence of shadowy doubles, these potentially complicit (which depends entirely on how people use them) cryptonyms leading to a great deal of confusion inside and outside of the text. Capitalism, for instance, is invested in a lack of material change, generating pacifying illusions that keep things materially the same. This “transference” extends to an exchange of material goods—hand-outs from the exhibit to those passing through. For example, Halloween’s candy-like effigies and costumes make for carceral nostalgia—cheap, sugary treats that distract children from larger issues like American genocide, all while coding them to respond to present-day reactionary markers of persecution (more on this briefly in Chapter Two and Chapter Three, and in greater detail during Chapter Four). A common visual outcome, then, is movement through their childhood homes, all while surrounded by other children doubling as otherworldly visitors codified under Capitalism: spirits, monsters, scapegoats who have passed through the barrier of the past into the present. As a byproduct of American neoliberal consumerism, Halloween is a cryptonymic, franchised commodity that encourages passive consumption, bent on quick, child-like gratification in the face of perceived evils made into masks that distract from the real perils under them (we’ll return to the idea of masks in Chapter Four): the status quo as perfidious.

For FOX to even frame the “eighth passenger” as a hideous violator of pure maidens inside a liminal space that FOX sell as bourgeois (despite the Nostromo spacecraft being rife with neoliberal criticism). To treat Alien and its monster as bourgeois, FOX must sell it to an audience whose literacy only continues to climb with better access to publicized information about sex. The studio’s sexism therefore involves a highly specific framing that doesn’t hold up under intense, humanizing scrutiny—not just the guy in the suit, but their performance as connected to, if not aligned with, monstrous socio-sexual norms tied to the space itself as a parallel Gothic chronotope. Regardless, these coerced viewpoints exist as part of the equation when looking at the creature as an artistic legacy (much like Hernando’s homophobic student got their ideas from sexist sources). Luckily the creature itself is more ambivalent, nebulously inviting interpretations that aren’t strictly endorsed by those in power. While the elite funded Alien to invite abjection as a means of sexual control, they can’t force moral panic onto critically-educated consumers who feel the enormous weight of Capitalism’s hidden abuses beyond a cryptonymic veil/ghost of the counterfeit.

(artist: Char Something)

This degree is variable, but especially holds true for groups targeted by canonical abuse: women as witches, and other historically scapegoated groups that serve as “oracles”—spiritual-symbolic guides between the world of the living and the world of the abject, of nightmares, of the damned, etc; but especially as secret-keepers of buried past knowledge, their “magical” predictions, in Marxist terms, commenting on a historical-material “loop” that power has covered up. As symbols of female power, witches are the prototypical feminist. “Good” witch or “bad” witch isn’t visually black and white, then; it depends entirely on who they align with—for or against Capitalism, in our case (which can be disguised in either direction; we’ll explore this concept in relation to TERFs, during Chapter 4, disguising themselves as “witches” in bad-faith; and real-life witches dressed up in consumes that pass them off as tolerable commercial fakeries, in Chapter 5).

Beyond education, part of the reason simply lies in the method of prescription: the invitation to look at taboo things that are commonly sold to consumers as a means of bourgeois control. By showing the viewer an image that can be critically explored, the elite need an uncritical audience to defend canonical counterfeits as authentic. But even those outside of the Humanities can generally observe a curious paradox: Behind the Black Veil, the monster isn’t as hideous as they were led to believe. In fact, it’s actually quite beautiful (“I admire its purity.”), unmistakably sexualized and entirely surreal. Hence all the smoke, mist and darkness to conceal the monster’s “real identity” in the original, 1979 picture: the false pretense of a petrifying mirror. This occurs through an obscured, dirty lens, pointed at a forbidden target that’s meant to terrify the uneducated. Look at it, FOX argues, but only long enough to keep you scared stupid.

This purity culture is FOX playing with fire. Their prescription—that descriptive sexuality is intrinsically repulsive—only holds up if the audience takes the horror narrative at face value (re: the monster is a cosmic rapist). The room for appreciative irony cannot be fully suppressed, allowing iconoclastic narratives to emerge through emancipatory hauntology as a form of political allegory (more on this at the end of Chapter Two). Despite Ripley flushing the monster out the airlock—rejecting it like an aborted fetus, attempted rape, or piece of shit—the monster remains ambivalent, displaying a chaotic potential: to be any of these things depending on how it’s framed, but also performed. These combined variables guide viewers towards politically desired interpretations, the outcome incumbent on the performer’s own agenda.

Now that we’ve outlined the larger systemic framework abjection takes place inside, let’s examine the abjectors—the elite whose desires course through a particular vein, like Alien‘s modesty narrative—and the sex-positive performers whose rebellious imaginations use the same ambivalent visual language to reverse the flow of abjection. Rather than treat the ghost of the counterfeit as pure product “fluffery” (the act of up-selling material goods), iconoclasts deliberately give voice to the unspeakable by scrutinizing these atrocities at a human level: to humanize historic icons of persecution. They do this by reclaiming “slutty” or “wicked” signifiers, ironically transforming them into sexy fashion statements and other appreciative symbols and spaces[1] of sexual freedom/material advantage (we’ll explore this behavior and foils more in Chapters Two and Three). Doing so, sex workers disarm their historical function as didactic instruments of public shame and guilt, countering the elite’s capacity for social-sexual abuse under Capitalism at the linguo-material level.

(artist: Cherry Blossom)

Sex workers achieve reverse abjection by meaningfully presenting themselves as sexually attractive and autonomous cultivators of sex-positive sentiment. Cherry Blossom, for example, is a sex worker who makes her own rules; she has her own OnlyFans, and specifically states for all to read:

“No hardcore or explicit nude content of my pussy (🐱❌) I work with topless nudes and teasing pics and vids. I love to be cute, provocative and feel comfortable and confident showing my body!”

Through her art, Cherry illustrates descriptive sexuality as the setting of personal boundaries. These boundaries outline what she, as an individual performer, is willing to consensually display in the larger social-sexual market. This liberation isn’t something to merely describe, but appreciate within a larger hauntological mode: “oracle” bodies that present forbidden sexual knowledge during everyday material production and consumption, including the idea that bodies can be controlled by workers (and don’t try to attach all women to one particular form of demonized knowledge: i.e., women only know abject knowledge, specifically the knowledge of life and death as learned through sexual reproduction and the struggles of childbirth).

By comparison, the status quo sells sex through prescriptively coercive, non-consensual displays. Sigourney Weaver didn’t agree to being fetishized by her male bosses. This tracks with how the elite regulate canon by invoking paradoxical modesty that manipulates target consumers through moral manic: a pure body whose chastity must be preserved no matter what. By presenting sex as “modest enough” and attaching it to lucrative projects, the elite transmute modesty as a neoliberal virtue—a kind of tightrope where the selling of regulated sex becomes the worship of capital: As a particular arrangement of moral panic, Alien reliably

• makes the elite a profit.
• grants them substantial bargaining power through the spontaneous acquisition of raw wealth.

What’s more, this profitability can be advertised alongside hauntological media that upholds social virtues in the face of threatened modesty. Alien, for example, earned the studio a lot of money. While viewers recall this rags-to-riches story about FOX, they don’t remember how FOX famously refused to pay out, citing a lack of profit (re: Charles’ Schreger’s “The ‘Alien’ Papers: Can a $100-Million Film Lose Money?” 1980), they remember the haunted house and Gothic shenanigans it contains. Regardless, the studio had gained themselves a lot of capital to work with (and a future franchise to toy around with). They did this as a giant company would: by prescribing sexuality through a moral panic that targeted a large conservative base, said base would unironically payout big for canon to console themselves with. Having the numbers to back this up, FOX hedged their bets did so despite hauntology requiring cryptonyms whose linguistic ambiguities can swing the entire exercise in a sex-positive direction (the elite want cryptonymy to be carceral-complicit, but can no more own this process than they can the Superstructure; they can only prepare, groom and encourage).

This consumption occurred through Sigourney Weaver as someone to advertise (with her becoming a de facto scream queen of retro-future horror in the process). Except her body is fairly anomalous. She’s not a short, skinny woman in the prescriptive sense; she’s descriptively tall, square-jawed and flat-flanked. In fact, she looks less like a dainty (and inoffensive) classic Gothic heroine, and more like Charlotte Dacre’s Victoria: masculine and violent, ready to throw down and make war as a war boss/queen bitch. According to Ridley Scott, the company president chose to make Ripley a woman (Tom Chapman, 2020).

Progressive optics aside, FOX’s onscreen treatment of their lanky debutante sought to further a highly prescriptive modesty narrative: the imperiled maiden of the Gothic horror. Even so, the filmmakers couldn’t hide that Sigourney didn’t look the part. Her powerful body looked incongruously masculine, a scrappy cat mom who looks after the crew by actually following the rules (which the elite discourage through efficient profit, seeking scientific discovery as the door to infinite growth: so-called “Promethean” Capitalism). While FOX checked Weaver’s masculine persona by presenting her as highly sexualized (with elements of rape thrown in to stress her nudity as vulnerable and feminine), the producers carefully dodged the NC-17 rating through modest nudity. Not only could Ripley not be naked (as Ridley had originally wanted); her body had to be well-groomed. According to Scott, Weaver allegedly resisted this idea (source: Hailey Piper) acting sexually descriptive by refusing to pull up her panties or shave her crotch. This allegedly forced the studio to intervene by censoring the actress’s “mom bod” in post: In a bizarre act of efficient profit, they secretly paid someone five grand to painstakingly erase Weaver’s pubic hairs—all because they thought the mere sight of those (and not her genitals) might swing the review board in an unprofitable direction!

The box office tally functions as a manipulative takeaway—that censored nudity sells more than blatant, pornographic nudity (regardless of context). The elite then use this sex-coercive lesson to shape consumer attitudes, presenting them with the idea that female bodies—specifically pure, maiden-like, and infantilized female bodies—are lucrative because they’re modest. In the process, these same consumers will start to adopt another neoliberal creed: personal responsibility. They see their purchases as empowered, as somehow dictating which movies get made according to what is or isn’t visually acceptable. They either mistake canonical endorsement as revolutionary (which it generally isn’t) or police morality through their purchases, enforcing elite hegemony by abjuring descriptive sexuality as an implied means of societal improvement at the hauntological-material level. So while the elite’s commercial goods decorate the home of free market defenders, the purchases made by these defenders endorse the current material arrangement of things: the privatization of carceral hauntology as something to communicate through its actors on set.

(artist, right: Persephone van der Waard)

As we’ve already established, total media control is impossible. Likewise, cryptonyms that adumbrate certain doom under Capitalism cannot be completely omitted in the revolutionary sense from future iconoclastic stories. However, the prescription of carceral hauntology and its sex-coercive elements is already so common as to be invisible, never mind that FOX concealed their “shaving” of Weaver’s crotch. So thorough was their subterfuge that I had no knowledge of the studio’s wacky behavior, 44 years later (despite being a huge fan of the movie)! When I deliberately drew pubic hair under Amanda Ripley’s panties (see: above), I specifically thought, “Like mother, like daughter”—the irony being I remembered her mother’s panties, which the studio had canonized; I had no memory of Ripley’s pubes, which the studio had excommunicated (even so, a part me figured I was being too sexually descriptive for those studio prudes).

The reason for all this fuss is that pubic hair describes sexuality and descriptive sexuality automatically includes elements that are abjected from artistic canon. This affects not just canon, but its proponents. Consider the sobering possibility that famous art critic John Ruskin allegedly couldn’t perform on his wife because he didn’t know women had pubic hair (Betsy Reed, 2014). Even funnier, she (ostensibly) wouldn’t shave her hair during their five-year marriage and eventually left him for his protégé, John Millais, who had no problems performing in the bedroom (the two had eight children together).

Conversely, descriptive sexuality also allows for conventional sexualities among sex-positive feminists, which SWERFs will gatekeep. Consider the guest star for Episode 107 of the Alien Minute Podcast, “Women Do Wear Long Johns” (2016), who stubbornly argues that Alien isn’t sexually descriptive because Ripley should be wearing long johns under her jumpsuit. Her argument? “Because women wear long johns.” This statement not only assumes that men in the film don’t switch to panties after they wake from hypersleep(!); it also implies that no woman anywhere in the universe would ever wear girly panties for herself. In doing so, the guest blanket denies sex-positive underwear selection as something to perform onscreen regardless of who’s in the audience.

So while I agree that the original scene was shot in a voyeuristic way for cis-het men, I also believe it can be appreciated in a sex-positive way in the 21st century while also acknowledging its sexist roots. The guest doesn’t even try, stubbornly prescribing modest underwear as something that (all) women wear. Little does she realize, panties—a symbolic consequence of Patriarchal control—can be cryptonymically reversed, teaching a sneaky lesson about sexism inside the Gothic as a long-colonized (and historically playful/fake) mode! The whore is liberated while naked, but also under attack in duality, and it is here where she can have her revenge for or against the state (re: “Rape Reprise“)!

Viewed another way, “authenticity” becomes a form of gatekeeping (re: gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss) that 2nd wave feminists execute, specifically SWERFs. As Wisecrack asks about Samus Aran, Ripley’s videogame counterpart: “Is a woman still authentically acting like a woman if she chooses to wear a bikini?” (“What is Woman? (de Beauvoir + Metroid)” 2015). Sex-positive feminists would say “yes,” provided she chooses to for reasons that empower herself; SWERFs would say “no” regardless of the reasons—a similar approach to burning bras except it’s burning bikinis (with a flair for trans emasculate and other modular persecution language; re: “blood libel, witch hunts and sodomy“).

We’ll examine SWERFs more in Chapter Two (and revolutionary cryptonymy in Chapter 4). For now, note how my descriptiveness of Amanda Ripley’s hairiness appreciates body hair rather than abjecting it. By doing so, my art also deconstructs the studio’s original canon, specifically the canonical notion that pubes are a visual extension of the vagina; to see one is to see the other. Not only that, but the vagina is abject, as well as the vulva, labia[2] and, yes, pubic hair. My “head canon” treats the bare body as empowered—not just something to appreciative unto itself, but something that reveals the abusive men-behind-the-curtain.

Canon shames body hair, the manufactured disgust towards it cultivating heteronormative bias: PIV sex between cis-het men and women according to highly specific body types and gender performances: adult, patriarchal men and young-yet-nubile, infantilized women. While these regulations severely limit sex-positive kinks and fetishes, the official position on female body hair oscillates between conflicted stages of public acceptance and rejection—ambivalence owing to critical positions that seek to undermine canonical attitudes about body shaming more generally.

While the elite use canon to fetishize body hair and appropriate sex-positive examples, the artistic appreciation of pubic hair demonstrates how deconstruction desperately needs an image under Capitalism—more often than not, an image to sell: the sale of sex, specifically that of sex subjects displaying their (often hairy) bodies. I say “subject” because someone choosing to sell their body at a particular hairiness is very different from having that choice made for them by the powers that be: “Sell your body for us, but shave your crotch first (except when it’s trendy not to).”

Women refusing to shave in defiance of male power structures is nothing new. To close out the chapter, I want to examine sex-positive art as one of a regular revolution whose various countermeasures like refusing to shave result from hauntology and cryptonymy as a colonized historio-material process. Doing so requires examining the process itself through its “ghostly” left-behinds, which we’ll do now before articulating how savvy rebels use iconoclastic art as a kind of visual shibboleth—to grow and cultivate into a larger message that critiques the giant, industrialized deceptions of formal power and its socio-material extensions. It does so through various covert countermeasures: the art itself. Gothic art excels at creating fear, often through ghostly suggestion. Used by those in power, fear can keep people stupid, suspicious and afraid; used by the iconoclast, fear can keep you alive, but requires you to take informed liberties—to deliberately lie in ways that must be cultivated and taught by older (often linguistically spectral and ambiguous) lessons; i.e., the revolutionary’s cryptonymy deceiving those in power by outthinking them with fearful art as an instructional tool (fear—specifically fear of death and pain—is an excellent teacher). In the words of Pat Benatar, let’s “get nervous!”

Onto “Toxic Schlock Syndrome; or, an Early Stab at Cryptonymy“!

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] For a parallel sex-positive space, consider Monty Python’s Castle Anthrax (re: exhibit 1a1a1i2, “Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n Roll“).

[2] A real-life example of the “Barbie Doll effect,” Linnea Quigley’s genitals were infamously concealed (Mr. Skin’s “Anatomy of a Nude Scene: Can We Talk About Linnea Quigley’s Barbie Doll Crotch…” 2020] by a plastic “Barbie Doll crotch” designed to show her butt, but conceal her labia—all to avoid the unprofitable X rating. Moreover, the film presents her seemingly perfect body as paralyzing to those who gaze upon it, frozen in place while Linnea consumes them with a giant, gaping maw (a metaphor for abject female sexuality and rage). Despite being a cryptonymic “chastity belt” compelled by Pygmalions pimping the whore, a sex-positive author could use the crotch piece to easily retell the same hauntological story as a parody of itself and the men/systems responsible.

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).

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Informed (Ironic) Consumption and De Facto Educators Using Parody and Parallel Space

Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale

Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don’t Create The Torment Nexus (source tweet).

—Alex Blechman, in a 2021 tweet

Picking up where “Half-Real: Recognizing And Performing Empathy” left off…

Critical thinking isn’t limited to singular positions. While de facto educators regularly serve as illustrators, models, critics and comedians, these separate roles often overlap. Their combined goal is to rehabilitate heteronormative consumers through informed consumption. We’ll explore these tactics through proletariat parody and parallel space before examining the symbiotic relationship shared between sex-positive artists and models—how their combined descriptive/appreciative sexuality upends the status quo through the process of reverse abjection. Lastly, we’ll explore some of the hurdles these educators face under Capitalism as a sex-coercive system: neoliberals, but also their appropriation of descriptive sexuality (which we’ll delve into more in the following subsection).

For the sex-positive individual, ironic consumption is where an informed consumer actively questions canon instead of dutifully consuming it. While this involves viewing sexuality and gender in a descriptive, appreciative manner, this first requires critical thinking in relation to material consumption as supplied by iconoclastic artists counter-cultivating the Superstructure (the elite own the means of production, but they can only regulate/cultivate the Superstructure—its cryptonymy and hauntologies. Totalitarianism is a progression towards total power, never its realization). These artists serve as de facto educators, teaching critical-thinking skills through extracurricular arrangements (like this book, or Giger’s artwork, see above): They aren’t taught in primary school; they are accessed through ironic consumption and counterculture media as sporadically available, but also optional (and gatekept by neoliberals privatizing secondary education).

Not all critical-thinking skills rely exclusively on descriptive sexuality to foster empathy (though they can). Two such methods are

• parody (from Sean Young’s earlier Blade Runner photo: “haha, that cigarette is a penis”)
• pastiche through liminal expression, often inside parallel spaces (from the same photo: “The world that Sean Young’s character inhabits can be a parallel, Vaporwave space that mocks the authoritarian nature of 1980s Capitalism, visually appreciating ’80s corporate aesthetics while isolating them from destructive corporate ideology.”)

Both are material responses to the status quo as a structure. We’ll briefly explore how before moving onto descriptive sexuality as a potential ingredient.

Proletarian parody is a form of play that reduces totalitarian influence by making it the direct target of fun. It’s a mistake to assume this fun occurs through pure nonsense, though. Rather, parody often relies on solid theory to poke fun at serious topics (exploitation of the masses). By comparison, the things they’re making fun of generally argue through dogma and force.

For a good example of academic theory versus dogma and violence, consider Monty Python’s 1969 “Constitutional Peasants” skit. The scene transports us to the hauntological medieval past where Dennis, a 37-year-old peasant, tells Arthur how Arthur became king: by exploiting the workers, specifically the “dated imperialist dogma which perpetuates the economic and social differences [of Great Britain].” This is all very true, but also incredibly funny because of how anachronistic it sounds. Completely baffled by Dennis’ Marxist jargon, the cognitively estranged Arthur responds with feudal dogma—except his arguments clearly make no sense! That’s the joke, which our de facto educators are using under hauntological circumstances to make a larger point about Capitalism.

Much of the scene’s critical bite comes from its night-and-day comparison between Marxist academic theory and the Divine Right of Kings, the down-trodden peasant exposing the annoying monarch for the daffy fraud[1] that he is. Dennis hilariously calls Arthur out, saying “Listen: Strange women lying in ponds, distributing swords is no basis for a system of government!” He even repeats this several times, swapping out nouns for emphasis. Enraged, Arthur attacks Dennis, then leaves—frustrated, but thoroughly convinced that he’s won the exchange: by rubbing Dennis’ lowly station (re: peasant) in his face.

It’s worth noting that, while the “Constitutional Peasants” scene continues to be remembered decades later, those recalling it do so inconsistently. Yes, Dennis’ polemic was made for laughs (and supported by theory performed onscreen by Oxford and Cambridge graduates); he’s also evoked by 21st century conservatives who unironically spout “Help, help! I’m being repressed!” as something to literally merchandise. As part of this bad-faith material scheme, they project their political targets onto Arthur, conflating social-sexual activists with tyrants while their own bourgeois, colonized parody reduces Dennis to a single, self-pitying slogan (aka the reactionary victim complex; The Kavernacle’s “The Right’s Victim Complex,” 2022]. Not only are these shallow readings selective; they’re woefully out-of-joint. They allot standard, not parallel space, into the parodic framework.

As stated during the companion glossary, parallel space (or language) works off the anti-totalitarian notion of “parallel societies“: “A [society] not dependent on official channels of communications, or on the hierarchy of values of the establishment.” While state media/Superstructure is inherently manipulative in a cryptic sense, the creative responses to this manipulation invoke parallel spaces where politically-savvy artists can exist: New Order’s Hacienda nightclub, their postpunk, disco-in-disguise an invitation to escape Margaret Thatcher’s bogus, decaying England by imagining something better out on the dance floor (a none-too-subtle allusion to Fisher’s “Acid Communism”): marching to the beat of their own drum as part of a disjointed collective combatting state abuses, power and lies. State chronotopes aren’t simply illusions, but mental “thought prisons” that tuck the larger hidden barbarity of transgenerational power abuse and lies behind words-that-hide in a colonizing manner—complicit cryptonyms for those who view and administer them through the language of commercial goods: canonical personal property. X marks the spot, showing what is both revealed and closed off!

Whereas mainstream/state media blind and trap the mind, New Order demonstrates that parallel spaces seek to emancipate the mind using language and techniques pilfered from the state; the spaces they offer are often hauntological, presenting a once-upon-a-time that “could be” but never actually existed, except in the minds of those who try to envision it. I say “try” because these minds are already burdened with a pre-existing idea: a “better time” supplied by those in power, who buttress it with unfair material conditions (more on this in Chapter Two). Although New Order was painfully young and partied hard, their iconoclastic behavior was nevertheless made in response to old ghouls like Thatcher—thievishly “re-liberalizing” Britain for personal gain (and lying through her teeth[2] every chance she got).

In early ’90s, New Order’s Hacienda went bankrupt, sold for loft space (which I saw during my stay in Manchester). The band’s emancipatory hauntology didn’t fail because it was universally unethical; it failed because the band themselves were hilariously poor[3] businessmen who did drugs a little too often. Even so, the academic theory behind the club was sound, but also valid: Margaret Thatcher was a ruthless neoliberal who gutted England’s Labor Movement (citing her greatest achievement as “Tony Blair and New Labor” [Oleg Komlik’s “Thatcherism’s greatest achievement,” 2018] because she forced her opponents—the British working class—to change their minds and help tow the British neoliberal line); New Order offered a parallel space that that undermined the original crypt through a troubling presence of decay amid hedonistic joy (source: Mahatma Grandig’s Quora answer to “Do Post-Punk Songs Have the Same Political Overtones as Punk?” 2016). Canonical spaces aren’t wonderlands, but fallible and corrupt—built on plausible deniability and outright lies that must be exposed by reflecting critically upon the historio-material decay they reliably produce, then imagining something better through media as an instructional, transgenerational device.

New Order and Monty Python both worked within Capitalism to critique Capitalism, funding their magnum opuses the Hacienda and The Holy Grail through music profits (the Beatles’ George Harrison donated $400,000 so The Holy Grail could be made, and New Order financed the Hacienda* through their record label, Factory Records). Despite their modest budgets, these creations were still financed from somewhere. More to the point, both projects are still remembered decades later as an effective means of counterculture parody and parallel space, which inform future material imaginings, retrospections and forays into abjected territories in pursuit of something beyond Capitalism (abjection must be approached and combatted, which we’ll examine more at the end of the chapter and for the remainder of the book).

Though no strangers to sexual material, both Monty Python and New Order seldom default to sex. Even so, their “alternate routes” helped consumers deprogram, thus break away from canonical mentalities tied to sexuality. In turn, their consumers could potentially move widespread material consumption (and inspire future production) in a more sex-positive direction. The key to this breakthrough is hauntological disillusionment, exhibiting older styles recreated for new purposes, thereby turning them into a powerful tool of critical engagement: the critique of canonical icons and aesthetics.

Canon is not sacred, or even ethical. It’s simply the status quo, the will of the elite as normalized. In sex-positive terms, this normalization also can be challenged through descriptive sexuality as a means of performative nuance—something to ironically consume through teachers using their bodies to personify the lesson: i.e., “Genuine self-expression can exist under Capitalism, co-existing as a means of emancipatory profit and material critique.” Often, this iconoclastic tutelage occurs through positive sex work—not just “tasteful” (modest) nudity but gratuitous bodily displays meant to produce genuine erotic responses in other laborers viewing them: quite literally NSFW—Not Safe For (bourgeois-sanctioned) Work!

Under Capitalism, sex work is generally portrayed as “lazy” and corruptive of workers more generally (“women weaken legs”). By breaking with the shameful conventions of a Protestant work ethic, de facto educators reclaim their bodies and rail against the bourgeoisie’s raw material advantage by using what they got. Not everyone is born with a silver spoon in their mouth, but everyone is born with a body. Work it!

(artist: Maya Mochii)

Sex-positive artists lead by example. Their bodies aren’t just objects in artistic displays; they represent subjects, often autographically according to a carefully chosen aesthetic. For example, many sex workers have a logo or brand associated with their bodies, whose various images and videos constitute their artwork being a morphological extension of themselves, their descriptive sexualities and genders tied to hauntological parody and parallel space. These topics involve ideologies framed through artistic expression more broadly—a persona within an intentionally dated artistic movement (“the big-titty goth GF,” see above/next page) or highly idiosyncratic[4] forms of sexual activity commonly illustrated through criminal-hauntological sex work: kinks, fetishes, and BDSM (more on this criminalization in Chapter Two). The steamer Susu, for example, often combines anecdotal humor with “goth” aesthetics attained with improved material conditions, using both to communicate broader sex-positive ideas (susu_jpg spam’s “Ocean of Booba,” 2022). But such things are generally overshadowed by psychosexual harm as something to camp; re: Maya Mochii. Humor and sex are modular, not mutually exclusive.

(artist: Maya Mochii)

Under sex-coercive conditions, the elite exploit workers by stealing their labor in non-consensual ways. Under sex-positive conditions, sex workers embody critical thought by sexualizing it as a means of communication. They then use this sexualized art to promote empathy for themselves through a mutually consensual arrangement. Self-expression and commodification aren’t mutually exclusive concepts; an individual sex worker can still choose to self-fetishize to generate profit (or achieve a desired sex response from a client or partner), improving their material conditions while recognizing and discouraging the sexist nature of sexual objectification at a systemic level.

As we’ve already touched upon, these power relations are incredibly complex, but also vast. This makes them extremely hard to communicate through single-body images with zero font. This includes pin-up art, but dialogue-lite mediums like erotic video and performance art more generally. For the sex-positive iconoclast, the aim shouldn’t be direct communication via pin-up art in isolation (even when its bodies are descriptive and appreciative), but something perceived as much through negative reactions towards the troublesome art itself: the sexist audience wringing their hands. “It is not the spoon that bends, but yourself.”

This “bending” can be Arthur, King of the Britons; Hernando’s homophobic dunce, or your garden variety TERF/SWERF. In either case, the lessons that iconoclasts offer beget from emancipatory education as socialized. While iconoclasts are often privileged (Monty Python went to Oxford and Cambridge and Hernando was a professor), the fact remains that anyone can be sex-positive, can express basic human rights through hauntological art. Totalitarian societies are generally resisted by rebellious citizens with relatively little material power, but still possess some degree of privilege compared to less unfortunate groups. Given the right lessons, these rebels can help society move away from the status quo, counter-cultivating the Superstructure out of the crypt and into sex-positive territories through emancipatory variants of famous hauntologies: parodies of, and parallel societies within, the Gothic—its monsters, atrocities and haunts.

Much of this transformative potential lies in the power of the human body as something to describe in ambivalent material language (which has room for parody and parallel space among sex workers). Few things are as regulated or provocative, especially when said body is “incorrectly” portrayed. In this case, correctness pertains to prescriptive societal norms: what reactionaries think is right and what the bourgeoisie finance. Whether on purpose or by accident, iconoclastic statements provoke these people for a variety of reasons: to change minds, make money or entertain (often all three). This isn’t to incense reactionaries in isolation, but involve them in the process of consuming and creating art as a larger social process: the process of abjection.

Put simply, abjection is the rejection of assigned abnormalities to cultivate a normalized status. This process isn’t a one-way street; it goes in either direction, towards or away from normality. Capitalists abuse the means of production to brute-force the appearance of “normal” through abjection. They maintain this charade for as long as possible, exploiting workers behind a neoliberal veil that shames them and their bodies while keeping them enslaved and unimaginative. The only way to lift the veil is to reverse the process that created it, reclaiming worker bodies and their bodily functions through social-sexual means that reimagine parallel hauntologies: descriptive sexuality as something to ironically perform and appreciate through Gothic ambivalence—i.e., BDSM, kinks, and fetishes (generally sprinkled with a variety of emotional “spices”).

The next several subsections explore atypical sexual performance through abjection-reversal, criminal hauntology and appreciative irony in greater detail. For now, think of reverse abjection as a black mirror that exposes the viewer’s abusive tendencies—an especially handy device when countering the elite’s privatization of sexual labor as xenophobic. Privatization is generally normalized through automated abjection, shaming workers collectively while driving them to work as hard as possible in heteronormative, unimaginative ways (the cookie cutter approach). Iconoclasts reverse abjection to make sexist people self-reflect in transformative ways about Patriarchal Capitalism. This occurs by forcing sexist into various telling responses that highlight a sex-positive, xenophilic lesson through reverse abjection. Abjection normally triggers a cultural “gag reflex” or “defecation response”: shock and disgust at coercively demonized hauntologies. The idea is to throw that back at the viewer—to redirect their revulsion towards their own dogmatic beliefs (and the hauntological crypts that produce them) rather than any dogmatic scapegoats. By humiliating the tool of their own mental imprisonment, sexist people can replace their shameful stances with empathic ones. Worker rights, body positivity, and sexist label reclamation overwrite their harmful opposites: the worker repression, body-shaming and unironic sexist language of heteronormative canon as carceral, crypt-like.

(artist: Andy Golub)

In other words, reverse abjection seeks to undermine anything that normalizes state apathy and violence against marginalized groups. This process occurs not just through sex worker bodies, but any sex-positive artistic role: models, photographers, biographers, illustrators, etc. Like Hernando’s classroom, this performative “chain” is holistic, communal: A sex-positive artist, for example, can draw non-cis-het bodies by selecting real-world examples to model for them (so-called palimpsest bodies). Their discerning gaze demonstrates two radical ideas: that gender, sex and performance are

• entirely separate
• highly variable, arbitrary and fluid concepts that individual people can self-mold according to their own desires and preferences, all without infringing on the rights of others (re: positive freedom) within working relationships/labor exchanges that involve sex or the material expression of sex

In either case, their combined demonstration occurs through gender trouble created in the real world, not abstract ideas dislocated from material reality. Radical ideas intersect with socio-economic norms, highlighting traditional boundaries that serve as focal points for abjection. In terms of active rebellion, abjection is the refusal to imagine outlawed forms of thought that challenge the status quo. For radical ideas to replace cultural disgust, thus have any impact on society at large, they must initially co-exist alongside seemingly incompatible norms before ultimately replacing them. In this manner, counterculture serves as a revival of emancipatory imagination, hitherto pacified by Capitalism’s carceral hauntologies enshrining the public imagination inside a cryptic Superstructure.

Said replacement involves a great deal of consumer nuance, but also tolerance. As something to criticize through ironic consumption, problematic sexuality is expelled by a horrifying proposition: that one’s nostalgic worldview is monstrous and infantilizing. Sexist people don’t see themselves as sexist, but holy and righteous. So this Promethean revelation has to arrive through transformative, underhanded self-reflection (the twist, in writing terms). In this manner, sex-positive artists/models motivate heteronormative consumers to change their problematic consumption habits by creating surprise pathways for iconoclastic introspection. This includes parody and parallel space, but also descriptive/appreciative sexuality in hauntological art. All three can alter how canon is viewed, consumed and digested, cultivating an empathetic audience whose collective imagination ultimately favors mutual consent within a larger, sexist world (until one day that world is changed for the better).

(source: “Head-Crushing In Search of Darkness Documentary Trailer Goes All in on 80s Horror,” 2018)

As a linguo-material approach, abjection is perilous in either direction; the current power structure will defend itself, attacking countercultural proponents and their material extensions in various ways that nevertheless draw attention to its own structural failings: systemic abuse. We’ll examine these more, including abjection as a reactionary mode, from Chapter 2 onward. For now, consider how reactionaries generally attack sex-positive critical analysis for being the death of canonical “fun,” unable to see the paradoxical joy in critiquing what you consume, especially media with criminalized-hauntological sexual elements (the moral panic of 1980s slasher films, for example). These same detractors fail to understand how guilty pleasures[5] can be safely enjoyed in private (many slasher movies are tongue-in-cheek).

Likewise, private consumption habits can easily become public, making it a question of optics. If this private consumption becomes public knowledge, there needs to be a sex-positive lesson to impart—that is, the iconoclast needs to promote public awareness about the sex-coercive and sex-positive elements being exposed. Neither is black-and-white. They manifest ambivalently to a matter of degree in the ambiguous grey area, requiring their careful exploration on an individual basis.

To escape the crypt of the bourgeoisie Superstructure, sex positivity needs to expand inside sexist culture by tampering with historically sexist media. Sadly, sex teachers are often shamed, but also killed for being sexually descriptive/appreciative (a common reaction to reverse abjection is reactive violence and abuse, which we’ll explore in Chapters Two and Five). But even if sexism were reduced to acceptable levels, educators would still have to remain constantly vigilant, lest history repeat itself through a return to carceral forms that spell real-world violence (the harvest of the fascist, which we’ll briefly examine in Chapter Two before exploring it in greater detail in Chapter Four). To this, they mustn’t combat individual sexists, but the source of those persons’ sexism and abject moral panic: Capitalism, but also its assigned champions (neoliberals) and blackguards (fascists) that weaponize hauntology in faith.

We’ll explore fascists more during Chapter 4, including how neoliberals defend fascists in moderate-centrist ways. For now, simply know that neoliberals more broadly defend the free market, hiding the abject nature of their own illusions in the process. They do this by appropriating feminist ideas of mutual consent, descriptive sexual and cultural appreciation into a “queer friendly” label they can exploit with impunity. These “stickers” of Rainbow Capitalism recuperate any anti-Capitalist ideas that pop into existence, specifically so the elite can turn a quick, unethical buck. If they can profit by recuperating feminism, including trans activism, they will, but Capitalism’s underlying design remains the same: profit above all else, achieved through the exploitation of sex workers by shrinking their imaginations with, what Bo Burnham in Inside (2021), would call “brand awareness”:

I don’t know about you guys, but, um, you know, I’ve been thinking recently that… that you know, maybe, um, allowing giant digital media corporations to exploit the neurochemical drama of our children for profit… You know, maybe that was, uh… a bad call by us. Maybe… maybe the… the flattening of the entire subjective human experience into a… lifeless exchange of value that benefits nobody, except for, um, you know, a handful of bug-eyed salamanders in Silicon Valley… Maybe that as a… as a way of life forever… maybe that’s, um, not good.

I’m… horny.

Global US hegemony under neoliberalism means that sex-positive re-education must be performed under late-stage Capitalism. Sexualized artwork is already colonized, and any lesson will intersect with material consumption as

• fundamentally unethical
• symbolically loaded/interpreted to enforce profit through various marketing strategies that are inherently sexist

I don’t condone the first fact, but individuals also have no power to replace Capitalism on their own (sex-positivity is a group effort). The second fact is merely a reality of dialectics-within-Capitalism more broadly. Materials, including hauntological materials, function within competing ideologies that borrow and use the same language to generate profit as a means of visibility. Money talks, even for Communists; but so do icons that reliably produce wealth—so-called “money-makers”: the butt, boobs, breasts and other parts of the (often female) human body.

Meanwhile the penis, and the pleasure it depicts during arousal, penetration, and climax—the “money shot” during the 1970s and ’80s as the so-called “Golden Age of porn”—is incredibly overrepresented in heterosexual pornography at large (re: exhibit 32a, “Knife Dicks“). Though Swapnil Rose writes how apparently Willem Dafoe’s penis in Antichrist was so big it “confused” screening audiences, “requiring” the director to reshoot the scene with a less-endowed stunt double (source: “The bizarre story of how Willem Dafoe…” 2020). This tracks with the penis itself as a cryptonym of sorts—i.e., something to hide, but also that which constant discussions about hides various embarrassing truths: an endless source of guilt, shame and jokes, with many men feeling inadequate through their penises by failing to “measure up” to the monolithic standard (the quiet part remains unsaid for most men, who are socially conditioned to not talk about their feelings).

Nevertheless, the use of either organ can allow for incredibly morphologically diverse hauntologies, which we’ll examine, along with revolutionary cryptonymy (disguises go both ways) in the “Transgender Persons, Intersexuality and Drag” subsection of Chapter 3. Think the “Trojan Bunny” from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, except Gothic, busty and Communist—a furry alter-ego: “No Commie war vaginas, here. Just us ‘bunnies.'” Whereas we explored in Volume Two how many stigma animals are reviled for being physically dangerous by state proponents (whose own veneer of strength is actually a veil for their cowardice and paranoia), prey animals are stigmatized, thus bullied for being weak and feminine; but if Jordan Peele’s exploration of prey animal violence in his race- and class-conscious works is any indication, the prey animal as something to assign to historically targeted groups can be used to express their traumas (e.g., Art Spiegelman’s Maus, 1986), subsequently striking fear into the hearts of their would-be hunters. This can happen while concealing the strength of the person wearing the disguise; i.e., as a kind of code that advertises what they’re really about for fellow conspirators: an uncanny cross between the wolf and the rabbit, but also something to underestimate for not being pure and authentic, mistaken for a servant in ways those with low emotional intelligence cannot fathom or know how to handle (animalized qualities can also be assigned to Amazons and other playful forms of revolutionary cryptonomy by which to convert hypervigilance and a sense of always being hunted to actually having a good deal of fun, which we’ll examine in Chapter Five).

(exhibit 65: Model and artist: Keighla and Persephone van der Waard. Keighla markets herself as an educated stay-at-home cutie with self-marketed “mom bod.” It’s literally part of her marketing technique. I drew this for them as something we negotiated together.) 

The paradox—of a sex-positive Communist making money by drawing erotic art/porn—is not lost on me. However, I also understand that we, as individuals, become invisible in the absence of material conditions. I also know that minds are changed through language as already-coded and defended by those in power. Whereas power aggregates to defend material interests for the elite, Marxists-within-Capitalism specifically generate wealth as a means to critique formal power by disguising as proponents of it (“When in Rome…”): to recode the Superstructure, altering the Base in ways that give workers the means to liberate themselves… while also making it fun? If the Count can declare, “Counting is fun!” so can I with hauntology and cryptonymy. Hauntology and cryptonymy—specifically emancipatory/revolutionary variants—are fun. Universally ethical people love nostalgia, monsters and sex; they also love being tied up, “abused,” and made to wear furry costumes provided it’s mutually consensual (or at the very least fighting for mutual consent as a basic human right).

Emancipation through these devices includes selling body positivity to express mutual consent. However, it also involves engagement with body negativity by granting viewers special perspective. The iconoclast explains cultural bias to the audience before directing them at historical markers of persecution. This demonstrates the viewpoint not only as harmful, but one that many in the audience already have.

This second function is our aforementioned black mirror. Sex positivity uses reverse-abject self-reflection to undermine the Patriarchy as an ideological structure, treating iconoclasm as the process of abjection in reverse. The aim is to advertise bodies outside the established norm: piercings, tattoos, skin color, hair color, hair length, body hair, muscle, alternate body types, and various other attributes that pointedly cause gender trouble—not to sow discord for the sake of it, but to break the spell of sexist Enlightenment thinking by critically engaging with Modernity through proletarian praxis, including gender parody. To do this deliberately is to foster a movement beyond Modernity (the Enlightenment) and its harmful ideologies, carceral hauntology included: Gothic Communism. Carceral hauntology includes sanctioned violence, formal power defending itself through hostile reactionaries whose tiny imaginations expand hatefully in mortal fear of progressive, emancipatory change (the latter often framed as “naïve” or “envious” by men like Nietzsche and his Apollonian/Dionysian dichotomy—the psychomachy of gendered reason-versus-chaos. As far as I’m concerned, Nietzsche kind of sucks).

We’ve discussed how informed consumption is sex-positive because it highlights canonical abjection as carceral towards the public imagination. Let’s further examine descriptive sexuality and reverse abjection as a means of confronting these problems, targeting the hidden atrocities cryptically enshrined in Gothic canon (re: the ghost of the counterfeit during the dialectic of the alien).

Onto “Reversing Abjection: Describing Sexuality vs Prescribing Sexual Modesty“!

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] If hating on the monarchy seems quaint, remember that monarchy worship is alive and well (Hasan’s “Everything Wrong With The Queen EXPLAINED,” 2022). The lasting legacy of the monarchy needs to be challenged, but also neoliberalism as an extension of power worship through the bourgeoisie.

[2] These lies include repositioning wealth behind the scenes and fudging the numbers to the British public (“What We Get Wrong About Neoliberalism,” timestamp: 10:49); as well as abusing state power through a militarized police force to achieve pacification through class warfare (John the Duncan’s “Neoliberalism: Class War and Pacification,” 2021) then disguising all of this. Fear, dogma and lies, the historio-material outcome hauntologically outlined by New Order and Monty Python, but even more aggressively by Derek Jarman’s artistic panache/queer splendor in The Last of England (1987).

[3] For a fascinating read, consider Peter Hook’s The Haçienda: How Not to Run a Club (2009).

[4] This idiosyncrasy extends to the artist drawing the model, who, by drawing them in descriptively sexual/appreciative ways, communicates their own preference in kinks, fetishes and BDSM practices. This includes mutual consent as being a turn-on (versus a lack of consent, which for sex-coercive proponents, is a turn-on: sexual abuse isn’t about mutually consensual sex and pleasure; it’s about power and control being entirely in the hands of the abuser).

[5] For me, guilty pleasures include camp, shlock, and trash that fail on purpose, but also less conscious forms of either. As I write in (“My Least Favorite Horror Movies?” (2020):

…what are my least favorite horror movies and why? To answer this question, I’ll have to talk about movies more generally. Unfortunately, if you asked me which movies these were by name, I wouldn’t be able to tell you what they were. This is because, in my experience, even the so-called “worst movies of all time” generally have something to offer. Case in point, I grew up watching Plan Nine from Outer Space (1959). That movie is instantly special for having been such a horrible failure for all the right reasons. Yes, it’s awful; but as Susan Sontag might put it, it fails in a way as to be enjoyed for the attempt, and for how seriously it was embarked upon (source).

However, guilty pleasures mean something completely different in regards to purity culture, which we’ll explore more fully in Chapter Two.

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.

(model and artist: Harmony Corrupted and Persephone van der Waard)

Volume Three: Proletarian Praxis, part one: Sex Positivity and Sex Coercion

Haha, well now
We call this the act of mating
But there are several other very important differences
Between human beings and animals that you should know about (source)

—James M. Franks, “The Bad Touch,” on Bloodhound Gang’s Hooray for Boobies (1999)

(model and artist: Nyx and Persephone van der Waard)

Picking up where “Regarding Tokenism” left off…

Volume Three covers praxis, specifically the informed, continuous application of successful proletarian praxis as we interpret the Gothic past moving forward. Part one lays out sex positivity, sex coercion and the liminality between them in three chapters; part two will articulate the creative successes of proletarian praxis versus state praxis, mid-combat. Consider this prep before the fighting starts.

Foreplay: Praxis Volume Outline, part one

There’s nothing critically “redundant” about the Gothic in its more dated-looking forms […] ignoring the paradox of the retro-future’s own hopelessly outdated anachronisms, the wizard, knight, demon or damsel, etc, well as their various stages of performance: their castles, spaceships, graveyards, cathedrals, laboratories of mad science, and other cultural sites of phobias, stigmas and urban legends […] can all yield creative successes (of proletarian praxis) through dialectical-material roles as determined by function (the aesthetics is just the allure and appeal of power/playing with dead things); in short, they can all be gay as fuck if done in good faith, thus sex-positive/iconoclastic by camping canon with seemingly wizardly power (source).

—Persephone van der Waard, “Author’s Foreword: ‘On Giving Birth,’ the Wisdom of the Ancients, and Afterbirth” from Sex Positivity, Volume Zero (2023)

(artist: Anato Finnstark)

Oppositional praxis concerns our creative success versus the states. Before we can consider that push-pull, we need to outline the dialectical-material nature of creative success, and creative success itself for or against the state inside liminal territories:

• “With Harmony’s Help: Addressing Volume Three’s Grand Emptiness and Ambitions through a Good Friend” (feat. Harmony Corrupted—included with this post): A 2025 addendum that acknowledges the state of Volume Three—i.e., after returning to it, three years after starting it, and making various small changes to it, but mostly keeping it the same—and, at the same time, paying homage to Harmony Corrupted, my greatest muse and one of Sex Positivity‘s biggest inspirations after it began.
• “Introduction: Dialectical Materialism (with Monsters—included with this post)” Takes Volume Zero’s theory, Volume One’s synthesis and Volume Two’s past lessons on Gothic poetics (history and application) to outline the objectives by which to apply our project’s central Gothic theories; i.e., in a dialectical-material way using updated, posthumanist models (expanded beyond Cartesian thought) to better achieve Gothic Communism one step at a time.
• “Before the Plunge: A Dialectical-Material Summation of Gothic Communism’s Execution (in Opposition—included with this post)“: Outlines the dialectical-material execution through which proletarian praxis becomes possible, mid-opposition.
• Chapter One focuses on sex positivity and the “creative successes” of proletarian praxis—how Gothic Communism, when correctly performed, cultivates empathy under Capitalism through mutual consent, informed consumption/consent, de facto education and descriptive sexuality as things to materially imagine (often through ironic parody and “perceptive” pastiche) through Gothic poetics.
• Chapter Two explores the proletariat’s dialectical foil—sex coercion, whereupon Capitalism “zombifies” consumers into “lobotomizing” themselves and others, resulting in abject, fetishizing witch hunts, toxic love and criminal sexuality as historical-material outcomes that seek to control sex and thoughts/cultural attitudes about sex, as well as the sexist, obfuscating ambivalence of Gothic canon’s coercive BDSM, fetishes and kink.
• Chapter Three enters the “grey area” of cultural appreciation, examining: the culturally appreciative, sexually descriptive irony of Gothic counterculture’s reverse abjection with sex-positive BDSM, kink and fetishization; as well as asexuality, queer-/homonormative gatekeeping and the ambiguities of trans, non-binary, intersex, and drag existence, but also their assorted discriminations begot from weird canonical nerds and the canonical media that turns them into harmful bigots.

With Harmony’s Help: Addressing Volume Three’s Grand Emptiness and Ambitions through a Good Friend (feat. Harmony Corrupted)

Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto of 1764 is still accepted as the “father of the Gothic novel,” yet most observers of this novelette see it, with some justice, as a curiously empty and insubstantial originator of the mode it appears to have spawned (source).

—Jerrold Hogle, “The Ghost of the Counterfeit in the Genesis of the Gothic” (1994)

This is a 2025 addendum briefly (five pages) considers Volume Three has having big ideas it could never explore fully but which I was able to later with the help of friends; i.e., the title of my book series being Sex Positivity with a focus on Liberation (of sex workers under Capitalism) also being in the title, but one whose universal application I focused on after writing Volume Three’s initial draft: while meeting said friends. These friends include Harmony Corrupted, whose shoot material I commissioned them for throughout 2024 and 2025 will be used to fill the gaps in; i.e., on top of them being featured on this volume’s outer/inner and chapter cover sleeves: to give Volume Three—which written mostly on Blogger originally—a bit more hardcore nudity! Said material will be censored to hide Harmony’s eyes, as per a regular boundary between them and myself:

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

First, I’ll be featuring images of Harmony here or there: a fixture of great power and endless pride that I love to exhibit, and who fills in whenever I need them to. They’re a castle in the flesh, whose special bricks I have laid scattered through this older cathedral’s deepest dungeons. I’ve worked with many awesome sex workers in my time, but Harmony is above and beyond the best (re: having inspired the entirety of my Poetry Module[3], as well as dozens of exhibits in the Monster Modules, and being my cover model three times); i.e., they work hard, are stupidly gorgeous, and produce impeccable results: few asses come close, Harmony’s an offshoot of the Gorgon’s own!

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

Second, the piece directly after is called “Before the Plunge,” but even when diving in, we’ll basically be doing “just the tip.” If that sounds confusing then I invite you consider the chapter summaries per chapter section (each with feature Harmony multiple times). You’ll notice there’s far fewer subdivisions (thus close-reads) than the rest of my series, and few if any of them dedicated to specific texts or individuals.

In short, I was thinking of things in dialectical-material language, albeit at its most basic; re: sex positivity versus sex coercion—with more of an emphasis on praxial opposition than liberation. The thesis arguments that would lead towards liberation—i.e., as something to push towards while developing Gothic Communism—would emerge when writing my manifesto and PhD after this manuscript was largely completed. I say “completed,” insofar as it had introduced a wide variety of talking points (to be holistic), many of which would be introduced here and only here; e.g., twinks and femboys. Meanwhile, other terms—especially ones I specifically coined, including “the liminal hauntology of war,” “revolutionary cryptonymy” and “the Shadow of Pygmalion”—would go on to make a variety of returns throughout the rest of my book series[4].

Here, though I was merely setting up shop, and consequently found myself going all over said shop. And while ignorance is no defense, here it’s merely a statement of fact; i.e., I installed the first stars of a very dark sky and then used that constellation to go where I wanted, picking up steam along the way. I could taste the palpable presence of mighty things, but only by grasping at them in ways that didn’t always bear fruit. But I never stopped playing with them through sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll (and various taboo subjects; re: rape play and murder fantasies), learning more and mastering ideas (re: “Back to Necropolis”) to eventually summon the Medusa to have the whore’s revenge. Furthermore, doing so happened as much through friends like Harmony as by myself—with Harmony and I in particular frequently doing rape play (re: “Healing through ‘Rape’” and the convulsionnaires, but also “Psychosexual Martyrdom“) to hammer out what eventually became ludo-Gothic BDSM at its most thesis-driven. Said revenge isn’t mine alone, then, but ours together as part of something bigger: the liberation of all whores, past and present, while empowering them in the graveyards of “Rome.”

The key to power is playing with past forms of it that are left behind; i.e., that survive us, and help workers remember individually what they can contribute collectively towards: what society has forgotten, but which through the Gothic mode is scattered cryptonymically all around us in ways we can recollect, reassemble and reeducate with. The more I played, the more I learned from the past while investigating it; i.e., as something to master while it mastered me. The state historically-materially generates tremendous confusion; we dialectically-materially reverse said confusion (thus abjection) inside the labyrinth and its infernal concentric pattern.

To it, the more the state rapes us without irony as monstrous-feminine dolls, the more we can rediscover and play with such things during ludo-Gothic BDSM: putting “rape” in quotes to break the myopia’s awful spell (fighting fire with fire, shadows with shadows, gorgons with gorgons, etc). Capital saddles us with strange appetites and toys to play with; learn from those who harm you if harm you they do, and then find others who don’t—i.e., to play with and leave better lessons behind, using the same whorish monster hero toys that everyone plays with for different reasons. Double them and what they use to control you, taking said control away from them through play on and off the same stages that liberation and exploitation occupy! The refrain is concentric, anisotropic, and ergodic in its fractal recursion, so there’s bound to be contradiction when doubling the past by returning to through calculated risk. But that is where power lies! Seek it out and play with it, leading to more emotionally/Gothically intelligent and class, culture and racially conscious workers! Normativity dies by straying into abject zones we reify. Development is a war of mirrors, so fight fire with Promethean fire! Kill your darlings, teetering between privilege and oppression!

(model and artist: Persephone van der Waard)

To it, Volume Three and its subsequent plunging into darkness faithfully serves as my Castle of Otranto—a modern-day Lady of Shallot’s murky suggestion of great things, yet strangely full and empty while seemingly covering much and little at the same time (re: Hogle, epigram). In the same way that Walpole’s castle did, Gothic Communism began as an incomplete shadow, and one I steadily built upon by constantly returning to it; re: including its rudimentary and insubstantial core. My PhD and manifesto would build on Volume Three’s grand survey—notably haunted by older authors—to steadily evolve into what, at least in my mind, I consider to be my finest work: my Monster Volume, summoning the Big Whore to have Medusa’s revenge; i.e., similar to Radcliffe and Lewis dabbling in Numinous energies that charged upon the same hellish fabric, I was blazing a trail with inadequate light while chasing ghosts, heading from Otranto to Udolpho and The Monk to The Italian through my own mastery of the Gothic mode, and subsequent meeting of great friends like Harmony Corrupted. Our bond filled the gaps between this volume and the others, but also patched up its own empty places with wonderful things to look at. “Stare and tremble!” indeed.

However truncated an afterthought that Volume Three ultimately is/feels like, then, Harmony is anything but; i.e., they’re not just my best model and muse among a pantheon of excellent cuties thanks to their numerous contributions, but an excellent and important thinker in actively shaping what Gothic Communism critically evolved into (versus Cuwu’s more passive and lateral inclusions, for instance). Not just hugging the alien, but fucking it mid-dialectic, they normalized the more radical, taboo aspects of play that ludo-Gothic BDSM evolved into; i.e., out of Volume Three’s inconstant flirting with demon BDSM, they supplied the distinction by already doing it themselves!

Love you, comrade!

—Persephone, 4/20/2025

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

Introduction: Dialectical Materialism (with Monsters)

While much has been made of its gory and oppressive history, one fact is often overlooked: capitalism has thrived not because it is violent and destructive (it is) but because it is productive in a particular way. Capitalism thrives not by destroying natures but by putting natures to work—as cheaply as possible (source).

—Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things

(model and artist: Soon2Bsalty and Persephone van der Waard)

Capitalism is the banality of evil dressed up in centrist, neoliberal aesthetics, which regress and decay towards seminal tragedies through the state doing what the state always does: lie to and utterly exploit people for profit. Volume Three is focused on proletarian praxis as a dialectical-material process working in opposition with the state. Before we dive into its chapters, I briefly want to summarize dialectical materialism (in this introduction) and oppositional praxis (in the summary, next) based on what we’ve covered in Volumes Zero, One and Two.

As outlined by my PhD arguments in Volume Zero and the manifesto portion from Volume One, Gothic imagination is a constant socio-material process—the byproduct of, and response to, structures already in place under Capitalism. Volume Two took these theories and did two basic things: one, explored the Gothic’s complex, extensive history as having evolved side-by-side with Capitalism into its current, late-stage (more destructive and exploitative) form; and two, treated that poetic, cryptomimetic history as something to learn from when humanizing monsters in the present—i.e., of taking what has already been made in ghostlike forms and making it again, but more “awake” and ready to fight during the war of culture vs counterculture conducted through aesthetics for or against the state: its rights versus workers.

Now in Volume Three, we reach my book series primary aim returned to: applying what we’ve learned to our own struggles, thereby emphasizing the central importance that Gothic imagination plays during proletarian praxis; i.e., in liberating sex workers from Plato’s cave as proliferated under Capitalism, doing so seizing the means of production through one’s sexual labor as synthesized through iconoclastic art, thus becoming a ghostly, Numinous expression of our daily habits and emotional/Gothic intelligence, ability to gossip safely (to prevent rape and other forms of abuse) and express constructive anger/ subversively “quote” false likenesses that actually transmute Capitalism through its own stolen symbols and language: the Amazon and Medusa, orc and vampire, zombie and cyborg as regressive copycats that need to be recopied for our purposes—our “darkness visible” and its rebellious sound and fur(r)y exposing the propaganda of the state as harmful.

As we proceed, then, it’s vital to remember how these creative successes are made in a continuum; i.e., within cultural development as part of an ongoing uphill struggle during oppositional praxis under neoliberal Capitalism. Ergo, its rules need to be considered as part of a structure that has become considerably more developed as a means of exploiting workers in the Internet Age. As an artist and sex worker myself, my proposed starting point is the Superstructure; i.e., what we consume. Reshaping it and, by extension the socio-material things it affects, amounts to proletarian praxis that alters workers’ abilities to imagine a world beyond Capitalism in a sex-positive way.

For example, counterculture hauntology doesn’t disappear once created; it becomes a part of the material world, allowing for various lessons to be taught by revolutionaries, but also by those in power resisting change. The oppositional presence of counterculture utterly demands status-quo reprisals, which this volume explores in detail: appropriation, recuperation, neglect, genocide, etc. The state lies and kills, all while shoving its canonical, menticidal junk food down our throats: their ghost of the tyrant and nominal, false spectres of “Communism,” frozen in time (unable to improve beyond Marxist-Leninism’s actual and fabricated failures/missteps).

The rewards of disobedience far outweigh the risks, but especially the knowledge to enrich the world. Paul-Henri Thiry once wrote, “If the ignorance of nature gave birth to gods, the knowledge of nature is calculated to destroy them.” Centuries later, the same idea applies to late-stage Capitalism and its deities—knowledge of Capitalism as a structure, namely American gods personified by neoliberal and fascist virtues that treat the human body as something owned by the elite, including its sexual labor and coerced divisions of worker bodies, emotions and minds—the menticide of workers. Although a bourgeois chokehold on this labor and its symbolic representation is currently present, the Blakean maxim “all deities reside within the human breast” allows for a variety of oppositional forces to materialize. Once present, they may start the long task of reforming Capitalism as a historio-material cycle into Socialism, then Communism.

Marx called Communism “the end of history” as normally produced under Capitalism—scarcity, class struggle, war, racism, worker exploitation, genocide, etc; but also the various neoliberal commodities that conceal or romanticize these symptoms (re: Fisher’s “hauntologies” mentioned during the preface: critically-bankrupt, canonical renditions of an idealized time and place, re: Bakhtin’s “chronotopes”). For us, this means Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism; i.e., as a something to develop during dialectical materialism that camps Marx through ludo-Gothic BDSM; re: to achieve intersectional solidarity during holistic study and liminal expression to camp the canon, hence achieve universal liberation in praxial-synthetic duality.

Those are concepts we won’t unpack here (as the previous volumes already do that). The struggle against Capitalism to develop Gothic Communism, then, starts with “archaeologies” that can disinter, thus recognize and retool these issues’ covert, mythologized influence on the public imagination. Such feats are achieved through critical analysis, not passive consumption, which this volume will now attempt to instruct in regards to sex work through proletarian praxis under Capitalism: a collective workers’ challenge to the end of history as defined by billionaires (or those optimistically defending them, like Francis Fukuyama’s obtuse veneration of “liberal democracy” following the end of the Cold War—”The End of History and the Last Man,” 1992) coldly selling bogus, uncritical monsters that make people stupid, then violent, then dead. Iconoclastic media absolutely loves to comment on historical-material’s vicious cycle in acceptable, packaged forms—Star Wars, for example, but also metal (and other forms of iconoclastic media we have yet to explore in this book):

Gothic-Communist development and its tenets (the Six Rs) starts with recognizing the working parts—literally the pieces that perform sexual labor or instruct people to imagine it under Capitalism. Human beings are complicated, possessing bodies and identities with ambiguously gendered and sexual components. Under neoliberal Capitalism, these variables are privatized in ways that keep people ignorant of ownership models beyond the one that currently exists. “Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it […] in short, when it is used by us,” writes Marx. This operates in relation to the current material arrangement of things, wherein the elite own the means of production, forcing everyone else to purchase the products of their own exploited labor—not as simple commodities, but artistic icons that compel widespread ignorance and emotional unintelligence in a xenophobic way, but especially a carceral fear of the imaginary past that pushes the world towards atypical ways of thinking that critique the cryptonymic treachery of the state. This emotional vacuum/Gothic ignorance and its various socio-political outcomes, along with the material structures that produce them, are so historically predictable that they merit their own phrase—re: historical materialism, or that history is predicated on the material conditions that routinely bring them about; re: Marx’s nightmare.

Our historical-material focus, then, is xenophilic reunion: an end to the abject sexualization of labor from the 20th century to the modern day under neoliberal Capitalism. Capitalism sexualizes all workers to some degree; neoliberal canon, as a fairly recent phenomenon, compels sex work through a self-perpetuating illusion based on old legends, a historical-material effect authored by a linguo-material chain that disguises its obfuscating role in Capitalism’s historio-material function: the harmonized, coerced bondage of producers, products and consumers by the owner class manipulating the working class, pitting them against themselves (canonical praxis). While its material byproduct can be sex-positive, sexual expression under Capitalism has long been colonized. Sold back to an increasingly exploited working class in oft-hauntological ways, this process must be challenged through material counterparts that liberate sex workers by first affecting how people think about sex in a countercultural sense. This includes taking the Gothic mode and imagination back from the bourgeois and using it for revolutionary ends: to free the cuties and other sex workers of the world, who in turn can assist in freeing all workers from Capitalism’s zombie-vampire like grip, the canonical praxis of its army of zombie-vampires constituting that grip.

Not only can a Superstructure cultivated by the elite be resisted through reclaimed sexual labor, but the labor of artistic sexual expression can reopen worker minds, teaching them to think critically about sexualized media as something the elite try to monopolize/exploit. In the words of Frank Herbert, “He who controls the spice controls the universe!” which extends to sex, gender and conversations or media about sex and gender disseminated through the abjection, chronotopes, hauntology, and cryptonymy of a bourgeois-cultivated Superstructure, a crypt to be led out of with similar devices used in opposition: reverse abjection, Communist chronotopes, emancipatory hauntology and revolutionary cryptonyms.

For the elite, total control is impossible, can only be incrementally pursued with semi-potent praxis. For us sexy Communists, the sexual bondage of workers can be abjured in pursuit of a better world that still has Gothic media post-scarcity (the real barbaric past). This starts with decolonizing canonical illusions, which in our hands serve as proletarian “archaeologies” to be freshly remade or whose current functions can be retooled to our needs. For example, complicit cryptonyms can be repurposed to “mask” revolutionaries, hiding them from power—a bit like the flying monkey outfits stolen by the heroes the fortress of the Wicked Witch of the West, but for our purposes level against the “Wonderful” Wizard of Oz and his own weaponized, bourgeois doubles and generational illusions (which survive after he is dead and gone)—beards and various other “creative successes” outlined during my PhD’s manifesto tree (rephrased “Twin Trees“):

depicting mutual consent, descriptive* sexuality and cultural appreciation through informed consumption and ironic performance, including sex-positive fetishes, kinks, BDSM and Gothic sensations as revolutionarily cryptonymic (fragmented disguises endemic to a larger hidden barbarity that can be used to help investigators expose the issue, but also preserve in the message in a human, or at least humane, ghostly form—a friendly ghost).

*While descriptive sexuality includes asexual persons, the focus for Chapters One and Two will be on sexual orientation; Chapter Three will explore asexual orientation in detail.

These are the root of iconoclastic praxis as something to synthesize by transmuting canonical forms of sexualized labor. Canon sexualizes all workers, but does so dimorphically (“boys will be boys, girls will be mothers”).

The elite have their own masks, beards and grooming methods meant to condition workers into a generational state of xenophobic myopia, including fascists and centrists as undercover enforcers. Gustav Le Bon once wrote, “Whoever can supply [the masses] with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.” Le Bon wrote this in 1895, at the beginning of America’s geopolitical rise under Capitalism; but in the shadow of the most recent symptoms of Capitalism-in-decline, his words still carry weight in mirrored sentiments. The neoliberal is a master of illusion, hiding their worst atrocities behind a veil of all-encompassing media. These myopic illusions consolidate their own power in ways that break imagination. In 1956, Meerloo called it menticide, a rape of the mind; Hogle, a crypt of the mind.

In 2023, today’s neoliberals commit atrocities like Reagan and Thatcher once did, using similar media control to present themselves in the best possible light—again, imposters. Not just themselves, but the neoliberal values they remediate through bourgeois canon—its “junk food” abjection, hauntology and disguises, etc, as “neutral.” As I wrote in the 2021 introduction for my discontinued book, Neoliberalism in Yesterday’s Heroes:

This includes overt propaganda, but also popular media that functions subversively as propaganda disguised as “neutral” entertainment. For example, the president of Tripwire writes, “As an entertainer, I don’t get political often.” But neutrality and nostalgia are hardly apolitical, and more overt political statements are backed by neutral media as default. Naturalizing/neutralizing war is a conservative or orderly stance that discourages the critique of war as a futile, doomed position (nations are inherently self-destructive). In that sense, this book ponders war and its heroes in a summarily insane manner. That is, I readily accept from the outset that pro-state/-capitalism defenders

• • view words like Communism, Marxism, and Socialism as having single, prescribed definitions
  • describe their intellectual variants (and their practitioners) as utopian, delusional, or seditious
  • revise intellectuals in ways beneficial to the state

For example, in 1949’s “Why Socialism?” Albert Einstein wrote, “under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information.” Almost two decades later, Martin Luther King Jr. was framed as a Communist radical by the FBI, only to be revised by liberals and conservative postmortem—reduced to a single, infamous speech that seemingly encapsulated the entire civil rights movement while simultaneously robbing it of its inherently “criminal” elements.

The same logic applies to Sex Positivity‘s goals regarding sexuality and monsters as things to humanize/reclaim from the elite in xenophilic iconoclasm.

As a process of countercultural critical thought, dialectical-materialism recognizes how these opposing forces meet inside a material world that is anything but neutral: canon versus iconoclasm. Gothic Communism frames this within oppositional praxis, recognizing how bourgeois propaganda transforms the world into a Promethean crypt using canon, which turns sexual language (specifically the language of sex, bodies and gender) into compelled sex work that exclusively produces sex-coercive icons—i.e., bourgeois gods and castles to defend by the working class, who become monsters in defense of it. Within this larger process, sexism works on a complicated gradient. For every open sexist, there exist groups who fight them tooth and nail; for every worker protest, there is a counterprotest—for or against the status quo. Fascists and moderates historically offer false “revolutions” that uphold the status quo. This prompts the formation of groups that confusingly and complicitly uphold the status quo and its cryptonymic structures while posing as feminist liberators: TERFs, SWERFs and NERFs and their canonical-praxis-in-disguise.

“If you scratch a transphobe, a fascist bleeds.” This volume concerns TERFs within oppositional praxis—how they are neoliberal and fascist branches of feminism that ultimately assist in the continued exploitation of workers. As the companion glossary further outlines,

TERFs are Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists; SWERFs and NERFs exclude sex workers and non-binary people, policing them but also members of their own “in”-groups (fandoms). It’s true that older feminist movements were/are racist, exclusionary and cis-supremacist, etc; so I don’t like to call TERFs “non-feminists” (though I can understand the temptation). To make the distinction between these older groups and feminism in solidarity with other oppressed groups, I call TERFs fascist “feminists.” To be fair, they can be neoliberal, operating through national/corporate exceptionalism obscured by a moderate veneer (centrist media). However, neoliberals still lead to Capitalism-in-crisis, aka fascism, which adopts racist/sexist dogma and rape culture/”prison sex” mentalities in more overtly hierarchical ways. Not all TERFs are SWERFs/NERFs (or vice versa) but there’s generally overlap. All compromise in ways harmful to worker solidarity and emancipation.

Either group upholds the status quo, defending canon and its sex-coercive nature by rejecting sex-positivity not simply as a universal negative, but as a prime destroying force the elite can scapegoat by proxy. Using canon, the elite portray the crypt as a home, its inhabitants institutionalized to prevent its reconstruction into anything that might free them from its enchanting grip. The elite compel attacks by the defenders against deliberately marginalized groups, which they proceed to exploit: women, trans people, intersex persons, drag queens; non-Christians or non-Americans; people of color and other ethnic minorities, neurodivergent/ace persons, people with disabilities, and their various intersections.

(artist: Aurora Prieto)

This volume abjures the entire practice, fighting for sex worker rights by using Gothic-Communist dialectical materialism to expose Gothic canon’s sex-coercive nature as neoliberal/fascist propaganda:

• a copious visual rhetoric that ideologically reinforces the status quo on a systemic-material level
• something to defend from iconoclasts, precisely because those individuals are seeking equal treatment from the powers that be—i.e., their basic human rights as executed through actual material change, not high-minded ideas that never come to fruition

That is, Volume Three argues for a sex-positive solution using oppositional praxis to achieve the Six Rs: worker/Gothic reeducation through iconoclasm as a form of collective worker action. Achieved through social-sexual activism, iconoclasm humanizes workers by freeing their minds, re-empowering them with renewed ability to renegotiate as sex workers. It does so by treating sexual liberation as a basic human right, not a crime. This deconstruction—of canon’s automatic criminalization of descriptive, sex-positive sexuality—reunites workers with alienized concepts, but especially a reclaimed agency through bodily autonomy and self-identification as a creative means of resisting compelled labor through compelled gender roles, sex work, and icons; re: canonical praxis. Iconoclastic art becomes a critical-thinking tool—a sense of re-play with the past, whose reimagined “archaeological” means of common workers (and their allies) can be reproduced and released, dismantling elite hegemony at the nation-state level before replacing it (and the nation-state) with parallel societies structured around horizontal power and reclaimed language.

Development is the process by which Gothic Communism comes about. This demands oppositional praxis: retooled language and iconoclastic symbols operating in strict opposition to the nation-state and bourgeoisie interests, where “working people [confront] the capitalist state [by building] their own organs of political and social power” (source: John Merrick’s “The Separation of the ‘Economic’ and the ‘Political’ under Capitalism,” 2016). These organs include the iconoclastic artistic expression of the human body as an extension of our sexualities, genders, emotions and oft-exploited labor tied to a continuously reimagined past, one whose methodologies have been cleverly reworked to allow people to imagine a reassembled world beyond Capitalism’s “perfect” past. “Decaying” in the present, the deceitful hauntologically of Capitalism has no future beyond endless persecution, war and genocide. While these are cryptonymically pushed to the frontiers, the domestic space is canonically sold as already-decaying and under attack. Eventually the state’s decay becomes hyperreal, a critical buildup of toxins eating through the counterfeit to corrupt the organism at a domestic level—from brain to eyeballs, head to toe. All will be devoured and devour in turn anything the state wishes it to—until the damage is too severe and the state, like a diseased corpse, falls apart.

To avoid this Promethean catastrophe, restoration of the proletariat away from Capitalism demands intersectional activism. Intersectionality requires two key steps:

• deliberately acknowledging the relative privileges and abuses of various groups. Atomized by the elite, these groups must learn to reassemble against a common master— to “form Voltron,” if you will (minus the canonical trappings, whose Zombie-Vampire forms we’ll examine in Chapter Four)
• combining various schools of thought to work harmoniously towards this union: Gothic Communism’s 4th wave, intersectional feminism; Marxism, ethnic studies, queer studies, Gothic studies, etc.

Keeping this mind, I want to dialectically summarize many of the main points from the companion glossary and Volumes One and Two—to summarize their larger argument about proletarian praxis as something to synthesize/transmute canon with during oppositional praxis by learning from the monsters of the past, effectively standing on their shoulders when making our own. Then we’ll move onto Chapter One.

Before the Plunge: A Dialectical-Material Summation of Gothic Communism’s Execution (in Opposition)

Now, I’d pause here in the story for a moment to underscore the importance of making proper choices. I was hungry. When you’re hungry, you should eat food. Food is defined as “a nutritious substance that people consume to maintain life.” This is what food is. These days, the definition of the word “food” has been bastardized and the meaning has been broadened to include veritably any material that can be digested, or rather, chewed and swallowed without causing death or severe illness. “Haribo Sugar-Free Gummy Bears” are not food. They aren’t even from this planet. I imagine their origins being conceived in a boardroom in hell by a top team of Creative Pain Administers, with senior-level Demons rubbing their hands together in ghoulish delight as Hell’s Chief Chemist slowly lifts the veil on their new creation.

—excerpt from an Amazon review, cited in illuminaughtii[1]‘s “The Sugar Free Gummy Bear Review That Will Change Your Life” (2020)

(artist: Xinaelle)

Whereas my past work has focused on neoliberal/fascist propaganda within heroic media, this book focuses on a specific kind of propaganda—i.e., heteronormative canon, and how the bourgeoisie produce it as a kind of revered, sex-coercive media that ideologically weakens worker control over their own bodies, genders and sexualities when consumed. This occurs through oppositional praxis, which has two sides that we’ll summarize from the manifesto before diving into Volume Three proper.

These sides are bourgeois praxis and proletarian praxis and we’ll re-examine them each in turn.

The first half of oppositional praxis, bourgeois praxis, is xenophobic; it employs the Three Cs (or Doubles) of Canon: sex coercion, carceral hauntology and complicit cryptonymy—prescriptive, commodified appeals that deprioritize, devalue and discourage worker agency in relation to canonical nostalgia as a kind of mental “crypt” that atrophies “active art” as a socio-material continuum of critical thought.

Indicative of the Superstructure, the elite can’t own the public imagination any more than they can regulate all activity performed under Capitalism. They can privatize the Base, financially incentivizing carceral media, complicit remediation, and bourgeois conduits of material exchange concomitant on exploiting workers for their labor through a myopic Gothic imagination. While this includes forcing asexual people to perform sex work, Capitalism sexualizes all workers to some extent, enforcing the colonial binary of a toxic status quo whose iconic simulacra not only divide AMABs and AFABs into men and women, but hideous monsters and doll-like novelties. Canon alienates us from ourselves, our labor, our bodies by controlling how we think and behave through what we consume. It’s (cheap, coercive) junk food that turns workers into heteronormative proponents: centrists, Nazis, TERFs et al, but also unironic/ironic victims (fascists are victimized and exploited by Capitalism).

Something to bear in mind as we proceed into Volume Three: In heteronormative propaganda, home is nostalgic, meaning nostalgia becomes something to defend from outsider forces pegged as disguised alien insiders by declared insiders. Gothic liminality is where iconoclasm thrives, working with a fear of inheritance to help de facto educators foster perceptive pastiche in trojan forms; i.e., sow a dissident line of questioning with revolutionary cryptonymy directed at the status quo through their own conflicted sense of self/identity as something for perceived strongmen to attack in assigned scapegoats by. Meanwhile, the elite and their proponents will try to normalize the conflict as something not to question, thus ensure Capitalist Realism amid decay as nostalgic. Queer survivability hinges on shapeshifting within the very chaos they engender (so to speak), whereas fascist “survival” defends the kingdom from imposters enemies-of-the-state; i.e., the Promethean quest of a closed, liminal space to colonize parallel societies with using the Imperial Boomerang and its liminal hauntology of war. —Perse, back in 2023

(exhibit 61a1: Artist: Ariel Zucker-Brull. The heteronormative exhibit and its criminal hauntologies deliberately portrayed the decayed future as sexually dimorphic, generally with a complete absence of trans people or their total demonization in dark, inhuman forms. More common is the fantasy of the curvy white damsel threatened by technophobic variants of the dark Frankenstein’s monster—their mighty bodies and tools of rape designed by mad science and out of control centuries after the originators have “died.” It’s criminogenic apologia, generally with a Satanic panic flavor [which serves to demonize queer people as thoroughly abstracted/associated with occult symbols co-opted by the elite and their proponents].)

As canonical junk food, these monsters announce the established order in sexually dimorphic bodies surrounded by carceral hauntologies, including standardized, “slum-like” spaces with complicitly cryptonymic, linguo-material effects; i.e., supplied by willing supporters of Capitalism who are financially interested or motivated to not imagine something beyond it, thus conceal it on purpose (exhibit 61a2). Though frequently haunted by Gothic sensations/spectres of Marx, canonical variants of these feelings are coercive, produced inside “fear factories” patently designed to disempower consumers and keep them callow—too afraid to expose the decay’s source or look beyond into forbidden sites of potentially better things beyond Capitalism; too weak-willed to challenge authority’s lies in the interim. Pacified and obedient in increasingly horrifying ways, they uncritically buy everything up like zombies, cushioned by personal property whose infantilizing nostalgia promote the idealized home as something to constantly rebuild in a perfectly decayed form: the once-upon-a-time of a decaying fortress that can be restored to greatness (with the caveat that this “greatest” cannot proceed beyond Capitalism). In times of crisis, they will rise to defend it, necromantically summoned by the authors of their altered states-of-mind (who only increase the dosage or alter the body and the mind by linguo-materially means, transforming the already-loyal to bigger and better killers—the stuff of nightmares).

(exhibit 61a2: Various pieces by Dcoda or myself, updated for the book. These include my commissions of their work as originally modified by me. Generally I would supply my own drawings of my own characters for them to draw [bottom-middle: Penny Montague, dragon priestess; top-middle: Siobhan, also featured in exhibit 101a1 with Revana; middle-right: Virago, also featured in exhibit 37f; re “Meeting Jadis“] as well pose instructions/models for reference [the top-left drawing of Revana was inspired by Kristen Stewart’s diving suit from Underwater, 2021]. Once completed, Dcoda would supply the sketches and/or line art, basic shading and flat colors; I would complete the backgrounds and render the final shading. The commissions represent a shared vision/collaboration of my characters as sex-positive embodiments of proletarian praxis, including the negotiation behind funding and reifying them. Similar to tipping on OnlyFans, commissioning artists isn’t just vital to proletarian praxis as an idea; it helps support the workers who synthesize this theory in their day-to-day lives; for examples of me being commissioned, consider Odie‘s many and generous commissions over the years, exhibit 101a1.)

By comparison, our second half of oppositional praxis, proletarian praxis, is synthesized by sex-positive artists working in concerted, xenophilic solidarity (exhibit 61a2, above): the Three Iconoclastic Doubles of Gothic Communism (the other pair of the Six Doubles, which opposes the Capitalist pair in relation to workers, the material world, and nature). This creative foil generates sexualized artwork in iconoclastic ways—to achieve social-sexual activism that unites all laborers, including sex workers, through radical empathy and imagination. In the hands of revolutionaries, this intensively creative mode deconstructs the status quo piece-by-piece by de-privatizing creativity (what Mr. Darcy might have smugly once called “female accomplishments”) in ways crucial to solving problems that Capitalism not only doesn’t want to solve; it creates them to maintain a Symbolic Order over workers it ruthlessly exploits for profit. Gothic Communism is an active process; activism is detection, stopping this exploitation by detecting its existence through linguo-material reminders of trauma.

As “The Six Gothic-Marxist Tenets and Four Main Gothic Theories” established, iconoclastic artists are emotionally/Gothic intelligent activists who use their honed senses—and close ties with their bodies, sexualities, genders, labor and nature in connection with the material world—to not just act like domestic-proletarian detectives and savvy gossips/code-switchers, but emancipatory “archaeologists” that help society reimagine the future through perceptive pastiche; i.e., the reclaimed monsters whose reclaimed poiesis we explored in Volume Two. Through this kind of proletarian transmutation, iconoclasts lead workers away from corporate monopolies on the hauntological past. To do this, they build elaborate strategies of misdirection through art over generations, which helps workers become more emotionally intelligent, actively absorbent and sex-positive, often through Gothic language as a liminal teaching device: how not to be duplicitous and violent for the state while keeping the BDSM ritual and its kinky monsters—its ceremonial victims as something to warn of state abuse while subverting it in frank, open ways. We have to acknowledge historical-material dangers as we teach people to not only value trust, but see it as incredibly sexy and hot.

As introduced in Volume One, this can have a “flashing” feel to it (re: “Healing from Rape” alluding to exhibit 53a from “Furry Panic,” exhibit 34a1b2b2a1a2 from “What Are Rebellion, Rebels, and Why” and exhibit 34b3b2 from “My Experiences,” exhibits 89 and 101a, here, etc)—exposing ourselves to reactionary outrage/moderate condescension (see, below: exhibit 61b) and genocide as we try to teach better ways that convey the unspeakable in healthy forms; i.e., good monster sex, healthy rape fantasies and other extreme forms of traumatic healing that accrete sublimated forms (exhibit 84a) that can still critique the status quo’s heteronormative defenders/nuclear family structure and shame/guilt control language that comes with it. This transmutation into proletarian monster porn or other revolutionary forms can be incredibly stressful and perilous. Likewise, red light/green light exist for a reason, so only do what you can handle!

(exhibit 61b: Top, artist: Yeero; left-middle: Auxtasy; right-middle: unknown; bottom-left: unknown, uncredited in source; bottom-middle: Bewyx; bottom-right: Cian Yo. Videogame art is not only prone to replication; it’s rife with sexism and general theft that dehumanizes all sex workers, including artists [more examples of this “Barbie Doll effect” in Blizzard’s canon, consider exhibit 73b]. Horny dudes share the art, but refuse or “forget” to credit the artist. Videogames generally feature women as composite monster-entities, where multiple artists follow an older tradition marketing to a heteronormative male audience [Jessica Rabbit/Gozer, exhibit 95]. While the team often slaves to a single “perfect” woman out of recycled parts, the artists are conspicuously credited as a larger corporate brand nine times out of ten [short of industry “names” like Drew Struzan, of course]. If many professional artists don’t stand a chance at being recognized and respected, what do you think happens to the little fish, especially the iconoclastic ones?)

As also explored in Volume Two, monsters and porn are liminal propositions—denoting a presence of conflict and transition, but especially rape fantasies, which denote the presence of actual rape/worker exploitation happening somewhere in the industry and larger world. Pastiche, likewise, is the “exhaust” of oppositional praxis. Our goal, as iconoclastic sex workers, is to decolonize lot of them by celebrating mutual consent through liminal rituals that grant historical victims paradoxical agency in the natural-material world. Said performative agency grant victims of past trauma catharsis, but also check traumatizing gargoyles by playfully fashioning their own within negotiated boundaries: to warn of what isn’t mutually consensual through the same basic ritual of peril. The deciding factor is appropriative vs appreciative peril—how sex workers are made into monsters as targets of state violence.

Sex work denotes a degree of risk that appreciative peril can minimize. Regardless of what people might think at first glance, sex workers are still demonized even if they behave within heteronormative boundaries. Cis-het white women, for example, are simultaneously objectified to alienizing extremes under Capitalism, then demanded to perform these coerced roles in canonical media: the damsel-in-distress, the princess pussy at the end of the hero’s journey (which is always further and further delayed until after the mission—i.e., the warrior’s death). But iconoclastic, slutty tomboys, cowgirls and space Amazons et al can absolutely express mutual consent in the same basic ritual. We queer folk love Zelda ‘n shit. However, we also materialize slutty Zelda or Brigitte as iconoclastic educators do: to create, exhibit and interpret art through our own synthesized praxis under duress. As a result, we will either be criticized, craved or condemned by class traitors (men as the universal client, women as the universal chattel, and various forms of tokenism)—all forms of coercive consumption under Capitalism. Maybe we don’t want to be chewed up and spit out?

Consider D.va from exhibit 61b, above (who definitely has a moe look to her). Provided she’s showing her pussy to a mutually consenting audience, there’s no abuse taking place when she flashes us. However, here is a “slut bias,” with men generally seen as “wanting it” by aggressive girls not taking the hint (as this clip with Elvis demonstrates, the girl definitely not asking for permission before trying to suck Elvis’ face off; source: Vali Greceanu, “Elvis Impact at Girls,” 2021). But this gender-swap is far less common than cis-het men abusing any AFAB or perceived-female person regardless of what “she’s” wearing. They could be in a G-string bikini, a nun’s habit or a burka and segregation or integration is no defense from rape culture and heteronormative men as “victimized” by those “heart-breaking bitches.” Can a woman “dig” for gold? Can queer people? Sure! Is it something they want to do because that’s “how ‘women’ naturally are?” No, it’s criminogenic/compelled, then reactively punished against—shamed, chattel-raped, killed (despite men historically being prospectors for gold under settler colonialism, the hypocrites). As victims to reclaim, this includes the ritual sacrifices as fetishes that still represent a likeness of exploited workers: School girls can be sluts and want to play naughty games—want to be “ravished,” even. They just don’t want to be actually attacked or raped for it.

The same goes for any sex worker/sexualized worker carrying/cultivating an industry brand. Cosplayers, for instance, are really just worker uniforms projected onto consumers—who synthesize various worker roles in service of or against the state treatment of the image being worn: the working woman vs the scapegoated whore. Power stems from showing off descriptively without being blamed for it, which feels good but also empowering through boundaries and trust being respected on multiple registers. This can be taught in opposition to canon; i.e., state-corporate monopolies on violence that compel forced boundaries (segregation) and boundary violations (rape and dominance).

Indeed, the whole point of iconoclastic praxis is to establish boundaries that must be respected, not compelled through brute force (anyone who argues otherwise is a figurative or literal cop/class traitor). Drawing these lines in the sand is something that can happen in person, but also in sex worker/social-sexual situations with workers going from point A to point B. We’ll touch upon this more in the “Recognizing Empathy” section in Chapter One; all the same, I want to do a quick compare-and-contrast. Sex work nowadays is generally done in ways that could protect workers regardless if its intended by those in power (who do not care). However, neoliberal corporations like OnlyFans still exploit workers doing work for them on a regular basis. Regardless, it is far, far safer to do sex work online, with a buffer between you and the dangerous client as you “flash” them than it is turning tricks in a dingy flophouse paid for in cash face-to-face (stingy Johns can quickly turn sex workers into Jane Does, if you follow me; or they can fleece you of your labor Tangerine-style, 2015, as my 2019 review for the film explores). Exploitation is uneven, but also imperfect, allowing for unique opportunities to arrive that grant sex workers “lucky shields” by which to conduct iconoclastic praxis.

(source: Daily Mail’s “Christie Brinkley, 65, shows off her age-defying looks as she reprises role […] 36 years after iconic National Lampoon Vacation role,” 2019)

My friend Mavis, for example, once flashed a truck driver driving next to here all the way to Chicago in the 1980s. They were on the same trucking interstate feeding into the city atrium; the trucker could see her but couldn’t he touch her. An ace person, Mavis delights at the attention of sexually interested men without having to have sex with them, especially the blue collar male worker as someone to fantasize about; i.e., the liminal privilege of elevated (often) white, cis-het women afforded rape fantasies in popular fiction that allow them to actually broach catharsis and playfully establish boundaries against persons who feel like they’re owed sex (the biggest nightmare/hurdle for sexist men being the encounter of women who tease or play with them, but don’t actually want to have sex). Likewise, if older industry women abused by sex work can give a voice to their normally “voiceless,” critically-blind heroines—i.e., Nina Hartley (exhibit 47b1a, “Non-Magical Damsels and Detectives“)—then iconoclastic artists can improvise, using whatever “windscreens” come along to keep themselves safe as they draw their own creative lines in the sand. Protecting oneself during oppositional praxis is the essence of proletarian synthesis.

For genuine activists, development towards Communism more broadly requires its “creative successes” to happen during iconoclastic praxis (which I’ll list one more time for emphasis): depicting mutual consent, descriptive sexuality and cultural appreciation through informed consumption and ironic performance, including sex-positive fetishes, kinks, BDSM and Gothic sensations as revolutionarily cryptonymic iconoclastic ways that subject them to danger. Unlike sex-positive activists, however, moderates and reactionaries perform these “successes” in bad faith, upholding the status quo on an ideological and material level by pointedly attacking marginalized groups, but also social-sexual activists (the focus of this book being trans people, sex workers and iconoclasts). Such impostors include TERFs and SWERFs, who, despite calling themselves feminists, are sex-coercive, not sex-positive; this includes their cryptonymic regalia, adorned as moderate activism but indicating the same overarching crisis that revolutionized cryptonyms would (the difference between them is dialectal-material context, a recurring theme in this book).

Though unethical and inhumane, TERFs function as a smaller symptom inside a bigger disease: Capitalism. While Marxism encourages group and self-potentiation through emancipated labor, Capitalism exploits the labor of others to empower the elite; neoliberal Capitalism uses “counterfeit” nostalgia to keep workers ignorant of the obfuscating role and historio-material outcome emanating from pro-bourgeois illusions. The elite privately own the means of production—from the banks that process transactions, to the platforms on which sex workers work, to the bodies and images associated with them (or vice versa). In doing so, they seek to own that which they have neither right or ability to actually possess (at least not forever): people and their imaginations, as framed through a Symbolic Order whose canonical, carceral, cryptonymic-hauntological propaganda advertises the whole practice as “correct,” until one day manufactured consent is achieved. Drugged and zombified, hell is a prison without shackles or walls; it is the language of creative freedom turned in on itself and disarmed, the image of witch something to wear while unlucky parties are lined up and shot.

As my PhD determines

Correctness is tricky. As stated during the “Regarding Hard Kinks” disclaimer, correctness can mean “what is right, or universally ethical—i.e., pertaining to basic human rights (and the health of the planet’s ecosystems and the humane treatment of animals)”; or it can mean “socially acceptable— i.e., correct according to the ethical beliefs of a specific group,” which under Capitalism systemically favors the in-group historically-materially exploiting the out-group for the profit motive. This means that as long as profit occurs, fucking the monster (xenophilia) or killing it (xenophobia) is acceptable under Capitalism in harmful, sex-coercive forms (aka efficient profit) (source: “Thesis Body “).

As we shall see, correctness dialogically amounts to interpretations of media made by consumers towards producers, be those individual authors or giant corporations. These interpretations are not fixed and can easily change given the proper push. For these reasons, those in power continuously manipulate the eyes of the public in ways that favor them (their image, or optics, but also their material conditions). By using canon to valorize billionaires (owners) and dehumanize/stupefy workers, neoliberals stress negative freedom for the elite; they advertise sex-positive ideas—including Gothic “false alarms” or “fake solutions”—in bad faith, using girl bosses and other deceptively appropriative tactics to sell war, thus maintain the status quo.

At the elite level, the status quo can be summarized as the roomful of suits. Their “neutral” appearance belies an inherently destructive nature far more extreme (through its longevity) than any dark lord: Neoliberals reliably outlast and outproduce fascists (whose tenure is generally short-lived). As the companion glossary notes, this concept is generally referred to as the banality[2] of evil—re: “destructive greed minus all the gaudy bells and whistles: the men (suits) behind the curtain (canon)” operating as neoliberal desk murderers.

Capitalism is always in crisis, policing itself through periods of routine decay that weaponize manufactured insecurities, enemies and divisions against the out-group by the in-group. Relative to those in power are those who seek power. Whereas neoliberals worship Capitalism as benign by hiding its material function over a long period of time, fascists seek short-lived, hierarchical power through equally unethical, media-driven means. Alternatively, sex-positive individuals are social activists who seek to replace the current world order by punching up. By discouraging the worship of vertical power through reverse abjection, social-sexual activists denormalize mass exploitation and genocide, shifting society away from nation-states and towards egalitarian, horizontal power (aka development, in Marxist terms). Called Anarchism, this new arrangement of power promotes basic human rights through improved material conditions for all people (not just the elite)—a permanent paradigm shift away from Capitalism.

This strategy is dialectical-material, creative praxis recoding the Superstructure through material iconoclasm as an oppositional force. The rights of sex workers become something to invoke, those exploited by Capitalism presenting themselves as exploited humans through reverse abjection as an emancipatory-hauntological force that breaks the generational curse. Laid down by those in power and carried about by those subservient to them, the curse must be addressed through relative means: by illustrating their basic human rights as something to empathize with in sex-positive, emancipatory-hauntological, revolutionarily-cryptonymic ways. In doing so, sex-positive artists are iconoclasts who seek to

• undermine neoliberal and fascist stigmas against sex workers, including sexism and transphobia as things to subvert using xenophilia
• help sex workers gain relative ownership over their own labor, emotions and education, thus improve their own material conditions through horizontal arrangements of materials and power

Artists often represent themselves as sex workers, doing this work voluntarily or compelled to by the elite. Not only does sex worker labor stem from their literal bodies, which also act as conspicuous extensions of their personal identities tied to images of a romanticized, reimagined past; capitalists exploit these identities through canon by claiming private ownership over the artistic output of sex workers. This is only something to cultivate, not literally own the same way one owns a factory. However, canonical praxis monopolizes the Gothic mode as oppressive, in turn making popular media sex-coercive, which alienates workers from nature and alienizes them inside the material world: as monstrous-feminine whores to pimp during the dialectic of the alien.

(artist: H.R. Giger)

Resisting the dehumanizing illusions of state-corporate privatization is a group effort, combating the alienation of sex workers as both a casual factor (workers are alienated from their labor during compelled sex work) and deliberate marketing tactic: Capitalists intentionally alienate workers who seek to reclaim their labor by using abjection to present them in progressively alienating ways (often quite literally as monsters, including surreal ones, above):

• One, sex workers are viewed as advertisements for corporations to sell and consumers to purchase; i.e., human billboards that advertise profitable commodities, not human rights.
• Two, this exploitation is downplayed, while its profitability is celebrated.
• Three, the exploited are generally dehumanized, abjected as demonic sex objects or criminals—to consume without regard for their human rights, deserving only of ridicule, derision and shame.
• Four, it demonizes critics by framing them as standing in the way of American (thus global) consumerism—specifically social activists that seek to upset the current arrangement of power by arguing for basic human rights, including body ownership as an important step towards material equality and post-scarcity.

The result is many middle-class people who consume canon voraciously and think (or at least posture) themselves as not being sexist; but in truth, remain hostile towards seeing sex workers as human. Their hostility extends to genuine and ethical, social-sexual activism as something to express in iconoclastic visual language by those who actively punch up—activism as merely a means thought sex work of gaining control over one’s own life through sex work as a validating and often asexually cathartic, pro-labor [thus genderqueer] sentiment: “By helping us reach parts of our sexuality, our trauma, our kinks, and our joy that so many of us cannot touch in any other way, sex workers’ work goes far beyond mere physical intimacy” (source: Raksha Muthukumar’s “How Queer Sex Workers Can Help Us Learn to Love Ourselves, 2022).

Passive or active, anyone who resists the system will be attacked, but especially those who rally in defense of their human rights, however important (re: “Paid Labor“):

The modular nature of the free market spawns a complicated legion of moderates and reactionaries. However, as stated in the “camp map,” from Volume Zero, hostility towards sex workers generally manifests in four basic ways under canonical praxis; re (from “On Twin Trees” and “Scouting the Field“):

• open aggression
• condescension
• reactionary indignation
• DARVO (“Deny Accuser Reverse Victim/Offender”)

We’ll get to these throughout the rest of the volume (and return to them in Volume Zero). For now, though, we’ll start with sex positivity challenging that paradigm.

Onto “Chapter One: Sex Positivity (opening and “Illustrating Mutual Consent”)“!

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] A recommendation of Zeuhl’s. In keeping with Zeuhl’s reputation aging like milk, so too did this recommendation. As of 2023, illuminaughtii—or Blair Zoń, outside of YouTube—was exposed for being an abuser, including financially dominating business/relationship partners working for her (not unlike Jadis abusing me by literally holding a roof over my head to gaslight me with; re: “Escaping Jadis“). There’s a gazillion videos on YouTube covering it; e.g., Internet Anarchist’s “The Deserved End of iilluminaughtii…” (2025). She’s also an extensive plagiarist and hypocrite.

[2] As previously mentioned, Disney explores this concept surprisingly well in Andor (The Canvas, 2023). Star Wars is generally known for binarizing morality—albeit from a rebel perspective, with an American Imperial allegory hidden behind Nazi visual tropes. However, Andor drops much of the good-versus-evil space operatics to treat the fascist regime of the empire in Marxist terms: through dialectical material language. Suddenly the storm troopers can’t miss, becoming capable of the brutal genocide Episode 4 hinted at by executing Luke’s aunt and uncle on Tatooine (conversely James Cameron’s canon is far more neoliberal, despite being inspired by Star Wars—a concept we’ll return to in Chapters Four and Five).

[3] Re: “Haunting the Chapel: A Cum Tribute to Harmony Corrupted” and “‘That Ass Is a Higher Truth’: Leaving the Castle; or, Bookending Harmony Corrupted” (2024).

[4] This volume will repeatedly and retrospectively elude to said returns; i.e., with block quotes and parenthetical exhibit numbers, which I have updated accordingly for its 2025 debut (I’ve also replaced the asterisks with footnotes). Any exhibit from exhibit 61a1 onwards is in Volume Three; any exhibit before that number is in another book volume and will include the source title with the exhibit being referenced. This volume was originally written before I devised the exhibit system, but I have since added some exhibits and allude to many more, besides. Hopefully if there’s a topic here that you feel isn’t explored enough, there will be routes provided to where I’ve done it to death! Also refer to my compendiums on ludo-Gothic BDSM and Metroidvania for some handy reference guides!

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.

Opening to Volume Three: “Regarding Tokenism” and Fighting It (feat. Nyx and Cuwu)

One lesson we can draw from the return of witch-hunting is that this form of persecution is no longer bound to a specific historic time. It has taken a life of its own, so that the same mechanisms can be applied to different societies whenever there are people in them that have to be ostracized and dehumanized. Witchcraft accusations, in fact, are the ultimate mechanism of alienation and estrangement as they turn the accused—still primarily women—into monstrous beings, dedicated to the destruction of their communities, therefore making them undeserving of any compassion and solidarity.

—Silvia Federici, cited in “Hot Allostatic Load” (2015)

Picking up where “The Future Is a Dead Mall” left off…

This volume concerns tokenism mid-praxis as a proletarian concern, which the rest of the series has alluded to, until now. We’ll trace the idea, here; i.e., as an echo of Medusa to egregorically reunite with; e.g., with Nyx, who I will reference here (alongside Cuwu), as well as articulating why we’re going back into Gothic Communism’s black peach pit, which Volume Three essentially is. Furthermore, this 2025 addendum shall explain what separates Volume Three from the rest of the series that came after it, but also what connects the lot of them while giving you various quotes/exhibits to keep in mind (as I won’t be modifying this manuscript much more than I already have)!

(artist: Nyx and Cuwu [photographer, bottom: Persephone van der Waard])

Note: Small changes will occur throughout the entirety of this manuscript in its final, 2025 form; e.g., spelling corrections, footnotes, editor’s notes, and formatting changes[1a], as well as dozens of additional commissioned images featuring Harmony Corrupted throughout (see: “With Harmony’s Help” for an explanation of this new feature); i.e., there won’t being very many cases past this point that are strictly “new” insofar as they were actually written in 2025. “Regarding Tokenism” is one such example, as is “Harmony’s Help.” However, “Toxic Schlock Syndrome” from Chapter One is another—kind of. I wrote most of “Schlock” back in 2023, updating it in 2024 before expanding it again in 2025. Sort of a final experiment, “Schlock” combines my entire Amazon research (from 2017 to the present) with a few prominent models from my past; i.e., discussing (once again) how Autumn Ivy was a big shithead towards me, while considering several muses who were far kinder in the bargain: Mercedes the Muse and Mugiwara. Said symposium is essentially the last of its kind for the Sex Positivity book series, so I wanted to expand on it for “one last hurrah,” as it were.

(artist: Mercedes the Muse)

There may be other addendums in Chapters Two through Five, but they will be far smaller in scope if they occur (the manuscript releases June 1st); should they, I will make note of it here and in the sections themselves. —Perse, 4/29/2025

To it, Volume Three explores the idea of achieving intersectional solidarity according to modern notions of sexuality and gender identity/performance-as-identity mid-struggle; i.e., as built on older poetic histories my other books have previously laid out—across different thesis arguments, but also repeated synthesis of said theory mid-praxis: versus TERFs (and other tokens) using what we got, on the Aegis. Many TERFs do sex work, for example; i.e., whores policing whores (re: “Policing the Whore“), cops raping nature in ways that go beyond the narrow idea of penetrative violence to any kind of disempowerment meant to cause harm of any sort. The whore’s revenge goes beyond simply “rape = penetration” (from “The Nuts and Bolts of Rape Play,” 2024) because that argument not only demonizes male GNC people or frankly anyone with a penis (re: Janice Raymond), but also gives pussy-havers a strange victim complex that ignores their tokenized role in things. Tokens are cops and cops rape; cops look like us and we look like them; e.g., Nyx, below, being incredibly sex-positive and for universal liberation, but having the Aegis to back it all up (so to speak). The fact remains, the Medusa and Amazons both have fat demon asses—a plump-rump “danger disco” to dance inside at cross purposes, in and out of themselves: humanizing the harvest versus harvesting the human during the dialectic of the alien, on and offstage! We must humanize the harvest to expose the state reaping us! Reap back!

(artist: Nyx)

The difference between cop and victim, then, is function relative to profit as something to uphold or defeat, which I want to unpack briefly here as we return to the past again (and again, and again…); i.e., as the whore’s recursive revenge against profit (re: “Rape Reprise” also featuring Nyx), but specifically profit as a form of tokenism we’re defeating while ensconced within “past” as something to embody and perform (also again and again and again…); re: “When the Man comes around, show him your Aegis!” Except while we will examine tokenism extensively in Volume Three, we won’t have time to go into more fleshed-out ideas; e.g., like the whore’s revenge combatting the state’s built-in, wax-and-wane, us-versus-them cops/victims extermination rhetoric; i.e., because said volume is quite conversational, but also older than the books I published after it which took what it proposed in shadowy forms we’re redoubling back towards now.

In fact, Volume Three remains the most conversational of all my volumes, because I wrote it back in July 2022; re: due to it being written before my manifesto or PhD, but also my Monster Modules—all of which crystalize, synthesize and disseminate these concepts far further than Volume Three was ever able to (e.g., “Demon BDSM,” here, versus “ludo-Gothic BDSM” from my PhD, onwards; re: “The Finale; or ‘Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n Roll!“).

(artist: Nyx)

As of writing this opener in 2025, then, most of my Praxis Volume has already been written. As such, Volume Three is the oldest volume this series contains—originally written while slowly expanding to yield the Gothic-Communist manifesto and Humanities primer (the latter where I developed my signature collage exhibit style; i.e., during the Bride of Frankenstein “poster pastiche”; re: “Making Demons‘” exhibit 44b2, December 2022). I have since revisited the Praxis Volume before 2025, making some revisions[1b] in April 2024 to expand on various elements to a lesser degree, but haven’t touched the writing itself in at least twelve months; i.e., as of originally writing this opener six months after April 2024. Now we’re here to finish the job.

To it, I’ve tried not to expand the writing in Volume Three any more than I have in the past; i.e., I want you to come to it and experience my thinking in its most conversational forms before I hammered out what the whore’s revenge even was (for the most recent exploration of that idea, refer to “A 2025 Foreword: On Volume One’s New Edition Focusing on Ludo-Gothic BDSM (and Cuwu)“).

(artists: Persephone van der Waard and Cuwu)

In other words, Volume Three represents a liminal (and fragile) point in my life—one in which I was newly single, having just separated from Cuwu following my exit from Jadis and Florida; i.e., I was still radical (re: “Military Optimism,” 2021), but had just left the closet and was starting to aggressively explore gender studies for the first time: as something to combine with Gothic theory and ludology in ways I hadn’t tried in grad school (re: “Lost in Necropolis“). In doing so, I would often talk about gender extensively and in ways exclusive to this volume; i.e., as a logical follow-through to my now-discontinued book series, Neoliberalism in Yesterday’s Heroes (2021); e.g., with femboys, twinks and asexuality as conversational extensions of what that series didn’t explore, and which this series would explore predominantly in Volume Three.

Content and combinations aside, the writing style here is also noticeably different—with 2022 me pointedly favoring em dashes and commas/run-on sentences/asterisks instead of the footnotes and semi-colons, but also i.e., e.g., and re that I adopted from October 2023, onwards (when I published my PhD). Not to mention, my focus on the Medusa (re: nature as alien/monstrous-feminine, from “Nature Is Food“) and universal liberation—once the praxial bedrock had been lain and simplified with my PhD/manifesto, then run through various post-postgrad thesis arguments with my Monster Volume (e.g., “A Cruel Angel’s Thesis“)—really started to inform a style that had changed beyond mere canon vs camp/oppositional praxis. Instead, I worked with an active goal in mind; e.g., as a steward of nature in ways Bay informed; i.e., developing Gothic Communism as an artistic movement that—until late 2023—had yet to conceptualize, mid-praxis (re: “My Logo for Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism!“).

To it, the flavor of the Praxis Volume remains largely unchanged precisely because we’re returning to a state of conversation before its synthesis had fully dialed in. This lends the proceedings more a historical flavor—one I have decided to preserve for archivist reasons, but also as something to return to with the benefit of hindsight at the current time; i.e., the ideas here are presented in their rawest, nascent form—Galatea lacking much of the detail and track to run along towards development again. I do so to give you something to work with, yourselves. In keeping with the circular nature of development, then, said track has already been laid in ways you’ve already explored through the earlier book volumes that came after Volume Three was written, then shelved; i.e., as ergodic and recursive, but also concentrically designed during holistic study taking Volume Three off the shelf.

As such I’ve saved this book volume for last, having educated you leading up to a return towards a prior state of ignorance expressed as the Gothic do: metamorphically and morphologically. Such (re)education happens through the preservative, fluid language of monsters and castles being things to return to in a given passage of the life cycle’s continuous radical change.

Keeping that in mind, please note the concentric approach preserved and found in the block quotes, below—the Gothic sense of mastery these suggest as returning to suitably older left-behinds again-again; i.e., a once-and-future reflection of the circuitous quest for Numinous forces; re (from the Poetry Module’s “Back to Necropolis“):

In short, “mastery” as I developed it became something to imbricate/enmesh with my living scholarship; i.e., holistic study as one of constant reassembly and rememory time and time again: “Returning and reflecting upon old points after assembling them is a powerful way to understand larger structures and patterns” (from Volume Zero) segued into “The shape doesn’t matter provided the function (and flow of power) is consistent” (from this volume); i.e., as synthesized amongst my friends, lovers, muses, fellow sex workers and I challenging the profit motive together as one, across many life times: our Song of Infinity having—like the zombie, the vampire, the demon—many shapes to assume and power to play with! The state will always try to monopolize our pedagogy to serve their aims; i.e., to recuperate what we use to release stress and confront trauma in palliative-Numinous forms: where power is, insofar as reifying and performing it goes.

(model and artist: Mikki Storm and Persephone van der Waard)

“And in strange aeons, even death may die.” My friends and I continuously place “death” in quotes, our collective ludo-Gothic BDSM a parallel, slutty “could-be” history challenging bigotry as a Cartesian, heteronormative, settler-colonial effect; i.e., one we challenge through Athena’s Aegis as reclaimed by Medusa as us, our sexy Amazonian witchcraft (and all its undead, demons and animal forms) camping the canon in ways the state thoroughly abhors: making the straightforward harvesting of us by the state and its proponent agents/sell- outs something to tie into knots. It’s a part of the experience and not one to simply slice through as Alexander the Great did, but find paradoxical liberation in knots (Amazonian or otherwise):

(artist: Evul)

Through a thoroughly chaotic, non-linear mise-en-abyme, Gothic Communism camps canon, making empathy where apathy has existed for so long. This happens by using our dark forces, our Satanic wizardry to self-define away from capital as something to camp inside of itself. To that, we camp the twin trees, fashioning a Hell on Earth to suit our designs (from “Concerning Monsters”):

This historical-material arrangement is profoundly ubiquitous, requiring workers to reclaim monsters (undead, demons and totems) away from the usual state monopolies of violence, terror and hellish morphological expression; i.e., during our own pedagogy of the oppressed—our anger and gossip, monsters and camp—having evolved into itself: a dialectical-material process whose oscillating interrogations (and myriad interpretations) of trauma took centuries while monsters were already evolving into state implements and canonical, singular interpretations thereof. Iconoclastic monsters, then, become flexible and productive critical lenses that raise emotional/Gothic intelligence and class/cultural awareness as something to “turn into”; or, as Volume One argues:

Contrary to Pygmalions and canonical weird-nerd culture, monsters aren’t just commodities; they’re symbolic embodiments of speculative thinking tied to larger issues. You don’t simply buy and consume them (commodifying struggle) but use them as a means, if not to put yourself directly in the shoes of those being oppressed, then to think about things differently than you might normally. It’s an opportunity to empathize with the oppressed and contribute to their pedagogy in ways that, to be frank, make you less stupid, nasty and cruel (source: “Challenging the State”).

Monsters are often seen as “not real” or “impossible,” relegated to the lands of make-believe and pure fantasy. Except this isn’t true. In Gothic Communism, they constitute a powerful, diverse, and modular means of interrogating the world around us as full of dangerous Cartesian illusions meant to control workers by locking Capitalism (and its genocidal ordering of nature and human language) firmly in place. Good monsters become impossible, as do the possible futures they arguably represent. Instead of saying “in a perfect world,” then, we should say “a possible world”; i.e., in a better possible world, nudity (and other modes of GNC sexual and gender expression) can be exposed and enjoyed post-scarcity and not be seen and treated as inhumanely monstrous (a threat; e.g., bare bodies being a threat to the pimp’s profit margins). Rather, the monstrous language remains as a voice for the oppressed to flourish with (source).

All this being said, this is an older part of the book, and one for the sake of time (and my sanity) I won’t be updating quite as extensively. Some changes are already in place vis-à-vis Volume Two, part one—and I will be expanding on things and signposting to make sure what I have already feels more attached to my published material, including talking about ludo-Gothic BDSM in relation to these older histories—but there will no brand-new monster essays from scratch if I can help it (no promises)!

As such, I won’t be going over this area of the book with quite as fine-tooth a comb, but will add exhibits, epigrams, definitions, visual aids and the like. The same, if not more so, goes for Volume Three (which has seen some changes since I wrote the majority of it back in early 2023) because I want to preserve its grain-of-sand quality that the rest of this book series has built around like a pearl. To that, you already have complex theory and simple theory to work with (re: Volume Zero and One), as well as my aforementioned synthesis of those combined aspects with Gothic poetics (re: Volume Two, part one) to achieve new useful conclusions building on my foundation. And yet, just as I argued with the ghosts of others to raise my cathedral, you will have to learn to debate with spirits yourself to raise your own, mid-segue.

As such, for Volumes Two, part two and all of Volume Three, you will be debating with my spectres; i.e., the oldest sections of my castle, but some of the most raw and earnest regarding sex-positivity as a liberatory Gothic poetic device whose essence remains intact, regardless if the language had yet to fully form. Per my usual backwards approach, I’ve actually done this before (from Volume One):

If you’ve read the symposium from Volume Zero (and the end of the manifesto), you’ll have an idea of what to expect, moving forward; I didn’t want to change things too much despite having written this second symposium well before my thesis. Like the thesis volume’s symposium, it represents a point when I was still figuring things out, and I think it serves as a good thought experiment insofar as it will represent a middle stage in your own thinking that will match up with [the Monster Modules. Their older partially-formed historical qualities] might speak to you better as you interpret and grapple with these ideas yourselves. And if you want increasingly more complete forms of theory that spell things out as much as possible, there is always the manifesto and thesis (source: “Challenging the State”).

Keep all of this in mind as we proceed into the Undead Module. We will meet again, our darkness visible a choking force that drives you, mid-penetration, towards post-scarcity’s unknown pleasures! Medusa’s fat undead pussy “feeding” as a war-like, indiscreetly poetic-yet-still-rebellious psychosexuality (re: our specialized Gothic poetic devices-made-flesh)!

(model and artist: UrEvilMommy and Persephone van der Waard)

Embedded in such endless graveyards, we’re all butterflies fertilized by corpses of our former selves—the caterpillar and the wasp chasing mastery in duality (a lie told by/to us and the state; re: “The Caterpillar and the Wasp“). The way out, as I’ve said before, is paradoxically inside the labyrinth; i.e., as something to transform through ourselves and our exchanges’ darkness visible.

In keeping with the sorts of fatal, transformative returns outlined above, we stand before Medusa’s Aegis before I consciously conceptualized it as such; i.e., Galatea’s mirror-like pearl having paradoxically returned to a state of dark plasticity by virtue of us returning to this moment in space-time: here in the present moment’s exploration of an older past one. Mid-hauntology and -chronotope—and reflective not just of my own prior state thereof, but yours as well—ignorance is a state of grace to return to; i.e., through holistic study of older documents reaching towards the future using “past” as bridge. The ghost of the counterfeit to further or reverse abjection (thus profit), you may look upon it and see not just either of us, but ourselves upon others who have yet to be exposed to such things—those still inside Plato’s cave, as it were.

(model and photographer: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard; source: “Meeting Medusa“)

Contrary to what you might think, though, you actually have the ability to take what is less developed—both in terms of argument and audience, alike—and achieve the whore’s revenge, regardless; re: flow determines function, not aesthetics. Here, that notion shall truly be put to the test; i.e., during “revolution,” as we think of it, a thing to revive using whatever’s on hand: a cake to make from basic ingredients. And this volume—my Praxis Volume representing Sex Positivity in its darkest, most rudimentary forms; re: focused on opposition, versus thesis and destination through ludo-Gothic BDSM—is very much the eggs and flour of a grander half-real recipe: “It tastes better than it looks!” Something of a paradox, the “cake” of old friends are both delicious and described as such (above), but also not actually cannibalized save in poetic ways whose more abject consumption (e.g., Creed’s murderous womb, vis-à-vis “War Vaginas“) we can still flirt with; i.e., the world is a vampire, but so are we, and in ways we can repeatedly learn from regardless where in the cycle we find ourselves; re: learning from Cuwu’s vampirism as a continuous epitaphic pedagogy of the oppressed, and one hell-bent on pushing towards universal liberation as it instructed me, past and present (no Omelas children)!

(model and photographer: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard; source: “Challenging the State“)

Paradoxes aside, Medusa is an idea, a lineage, a point of practice that mutates; she (and her worship) take many forms—i.e., insofar as the Base and Superstructure function as things to reclaim on the same shared stages (where past, present and future occupy the same shadows, or constitute what the same shadows represent through play as a half-real proposition). We’re all shadows and dust, but also pieces of meat arbitrating our basic rights (and those of nature and the environment as their stewards) through mutual consent; i.e., as something to illustrate paradoxically as the Gothic do: through the language of “rape” in quotes, camping canon not once, but in perpetuity during informed labor exchanges expressed through psychosexual art (with Medusa being the ancient enemy of the state, pimped by it until the sun burns out).

So take what’s available here and use it to bring Medusa (and the palliative Numinous) back to life again; i.e., in ways she never quite enjoyed, in yesteryear’s imaginary historical past. Concerning the Wisdom of the Ancients, there’s no clear divide between fiction and non-fiction. So give power shape in ways that readily yield new constructions, thereby showing capital your Aegis, when the harvest is once more at hand! When the reaper comes around, so does the thing to reap—but there’s no monopoly on who holds the sickle during a given reunion!

To that, we’re going back to Necropolis again, losing ourselves once more in Medusa’s castle-in-the-flesh (with Cuwu being someone that haunts Volume Three—a person I wouldn’t write about extensively until my manifesto and PhD, then show visually in the Poetry Module, onwards; re: “Returning to Volume One, Two Years Later“): a shadowy likeness (the egregore/simulacrum) to fertilize thought as it manifests between people and media; i.e., as not discrete in the present moment, but also the past of a potential future nonetheless expressed as “past” (the Neo-Gothic modus operandi, ever and always). Cakes—including shadows of cakes—still need frosting to cryptomimetically lubricate future potentiation: fucking the dead in ways that hyphenate sex, food, war and so on.

In keeping with Walpole, so does the shadow of the past represent something that never quite was, but also potentializes a given future moment to circle back around towards; i.e., again, the rememory process injecting something into something else at various phenomenological and liminal states of space and time informing the lesson (and cryptonymy process), ipso facto. We move through space and time, but also embody them as hauntological occupants thereof to reexplore (echoes of Ozymandias, swapping him out for Medusa): new dark temples to raise and “pillage.”

(artists: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard)

As such, the Praxis Volume constitutes a precious opportunity to anisotropically reverse the flow of power during the usual Gothic aesthetics/fakeries guiding workers in either direction during future forms of “pastness”; re: through oppositional praxis, our focus being the proletarian reclamation of such things. Raw and waiting to patiently sculpt back into fresh forms touching on older mysteries and reunions (the Communist Numinous versus Caesar’s ghost), Volume Three is closer to my blog-style approach from the 2010s than my thesis-heavy argumentation, post-PhD.

Furthermore, my collage invigilation style and collab approach with sex workers/emphasis on footnotes were both things I hadn’t hammered out, yet; i.e., doing so in the Humanities primer (re: exhibit 44b2, “Fire of Unknown Origin“) and my PhD’s camp map finale, respectively. But in terms of sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll, I was still playing with those things and the Gothic mode—indeed, had been doing so for years up to this point (re: “Sex, Metal and Videogames” but also Nyx, below).

The poetic combination, here, is more conversational while still hurtling towards thesis and theory being things I would eventually synthesize multiple times; i.e., when moving echopraxially back towards conversation, two years after my PhD released. In essence, 2025 me is confronting my own past as the future of older moments I holistically built on while pushing towards where I currently am looking backwards and forwards at the same time—now that this book series is nearly done, standing at the hellish center of the black hole’s entropic core! There and back again, the Gothic is writ in tremendous obscurity, power and fragmentation. So does Medusa haunt the mirror that Pygmalion punches, his Shadow’s Cycle of Kings trying to pimp Galatea inside the infernal concentric pattern: as something whose dominion and domination are never fully secure; i.e., from Metroidvania to mommy domme, the Gothic castle is the perfect domme, but one that has infinite power and form!

(artist: Nyx)

Medusa cannot die. So here we are, playing with the same shadows and shapes of the Medusa for you to summon; i.e., in the singularity of my larger Gothic project. If you need theory (simple or complex), refer to Volumes One or Zero; if you need poetry pointers or examples of Gothic poetics in the Humanities with ludo-Gothic BDSM, refer to Volume Two. Here, “ludo-Gothic BDSM” and even “Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism” are barely mentioned; “demon BDSM” and “iconoclastic media” are where this volume was at, when I wrote it, as well as focusing fully on the creative successes of proletarian praxis (re: our “cake’s” “eggs” and “flour”). To it, they’re what I chose to stress, back then, and what we’ll be inspecting now as such. The other stuff—especially the whore’s revenge had in duality during liminal expression, thereby healing from rape to achieve universal liberation through an intersectionally solidarized pedagogy of the oppressed (re: “Healing from Rape“)—came later. These ideas highlight sex positivity versus sex coercion, the latter of which we’ll be discussing in the language I was using early in the project; i.e., as holistically part of the same Gothic return!

Furthermore, the fundamentals of sex positivity and proletarian praxis—re: mutual consent, informed consumption and informed consent, sex-positive de facto education, descriptive sexuality and cultural appreciation through the appreciative irony of Gothic counterculture—are arranged as I originally envisioned them; i.e., before writing my PhD and other volumes around them, encasing the pearl. In short, they are Sex Positivity‘s aforementioned grain of sand, around which you should recognize and build your own sex-positive worlds regardless of my corpus and however much of it you’ve explored! “Hold infinity in the palm of your hand”!

To that, I could have released this volume first (and actually did, only to take it down shortly after became it too large for Blogger), but still think it works best if you have some degree of theory and history to apply to your own synthetic arguments—in short, that you have something to synthesize, mid-praxis. Theory informs habits, and habits shape play as a circular means of control and expression over what we got extending into the future through “past” doubles on the Aegis as the Aegis; e.g., Nyx’s public nudism and art-through-porn, but also their clothes, tattoos, piercings, and so on! They’re one of my original muses—a dark mommy similar to Cuwu, Blxxd Bunny and many others cohabitating revolution as the Gothic do: through castles illustrating Capitalism and Communism in small and in the flesh, making battle! So have both of us continued to fight fire with fire, punching up against tokenism from the very Hell that TERFs (and other traitors) try to reinvade. Genocide is overshadowed by dead whores, but whores don’t always stay dead, insofar as the Gothic is concerned! Make it your power to fight back against state proponents policing you with, flagging their courage and wits! The cake is a lie, so make it a splendid lie!

(artist: Nyx)

As such, this volume combines the elementary aspects of gender theory with the problem of tokenism at large; i.e., as something to playfully solve with, if not ludo-Gothic BDSM, then demon BDSM through our own intersectional solidarity and universal liberation as eventually turning into what I later called ludo-Gothic BDSM (re: “Concerning Rape Play“). Forged out of old struggles merged with modernized conceptualizations of these basic ideas, I outlined them in Volume Two’s aforementioned modular thesis. Moving forwards into the past that Volume Three represents, then, I want to include a series of useful block quotes, here; i.e., that pertain to Capitalism and what causes people to tokenize, thus interrogate why they gentrify and decay when incentivized to do so! Apart from the manifesto tree (which I have also included for your convenience), keep ’em handy as we proceed into my Gothic castle’s oldest portions!

To cite in Volume Three (six quotes):

1. No one is immune from power as a structure in service to the elite, but it can be resisted in service to labor. However things reduce, division serves profit, and anything that serves profit, while predatory and unequal, can be critiqued per the elite’s usual trifectas, attempted monopolies (violence, terror and monsters), and qualities of capital (Cartesian, settler-colonial, heteronormative); i.e., as it sexualizes everything only to gentrify/tokenize and decay over and over and over while defending the state. Per Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism, intersectional solidarity does not serve profit regardless of the variables at play (an inverse of the listed qualities, above). There’s several dialectical-material binaries, but loads of grey area. The only way to distinguish this from that between the constants and variables is to play with them in ways that distribute as a matter of privilege and oppression; i.e., what we’re born into: prisons, settler colonies, empire (source: “Back to the Necropolis,” 2024).

[artist: Zdzisław Beksiński]

2. White or not, the middle class are the gatekeepers of capital and its nuclear-familial design, and allow for various marginalized concessions of “representation” that eventually disappear when fascist power is formally attained; i.e., the state finally entering a “rabid” state only to be put down by another state not yet in decay to the same extent; e.g., America vs Nazi Germany […] At home and abroad, American Liberalism [and the middle class] always decay fascistically into darker versions of itself that self-defend until total collapse trying to decay into fresh forms of the same-old inequality under Imperialism—i.e., America’s true purpose (Cartesian exploitation) projected onto Nazi Germany as the “only” Nazis in town, despite America being the breeding ground for fascism having inspired others since the late 1800s: as the global economic superpower!

China’s recent developments are changing this hegemony and the chickens are already coming home to roost; i.e., token, corporatized arbitration of Imperialism-in-crisis in ways America cannot stop, no matter how many female and non-white girl bosses they turn into unironic Amazons, vampires, Medusa, etc! “Home” as a fatal portrait will decay until it eats itself, specifically the next-in-line. Our rights are stripped down and eaten by the state until our right to exist becomes anathema, zombie-like. Then the state dies. Until then, the state is always “in danger” as something to abject onto labor threatening the nuclear families of the middle class; rinse and repeat (source: “Back to the Necropolis,” 2024).

3. Per Volume Zero, fascists will predictably respond with deception and violence; i.e., acting “oppressed” when we “break” (critique/revolutionize) their canonical masks and monstrous toys (all heroes are monsters). As such, weird canonical nerds will respond with Man Box/”prison sex” behaviors tied to the profit motive: open aggression, condescension, reactionary indignation and DARVO. This applies to film critics, speedrunners, cosplayers, and basically any form of content/media you could think of/up regarding consumption, creation or privatization. […] Nazis defend Nazis, and Nazis (token or not) defend capital. Listen to the stink they pitch and expose them as you do—with your Aegis! They won’t be able to resist tone-policing or otherwise attacking Medusa out in the open, but won’t be able to harm you if you flash behind buffers (which the Internet provides, sex work being so taboo and commercialized that it becomes hard for fascists [or sex workers] to talk about at all because bare-and-exposed forms aren’t “ad friendly” but, for us, become a place to congregate and confer); e.g., Fired Up Stilettos, below, fighting for the decriminalization of sex work (sloganizing “stripping doesn’t equal consent” and “tip me” through them using their bodies to advertise inclusive graffiti/billboard activism); i.e., actual guerrillas out-maneuvering the clumsy imperial pig playing “guerilla” themselves (source: “‘Death by Snu-Snu!’: From Herbos to Himbos, part 2,” 2024).

4. Hell, as I’ve said, is always a place on Earth[2]; i.e., from “Transylvania” in quotes to Palestine and neighboring territories of conquest defended by state forces even when the apocalypse denudes; e.g., the Rational National’s “Israel Strikes Sheltering Palestinians In Open Defiance Of Recent ICJ Order” (2024). To this, Rafah is being bombed to the same degree as Gaze by the IDF disobeying the ICJ (no surprise, there) because that’s what the state does. American liberals and centrists elsewhere will ignore these realities until they can’t, then condemn them with meaningless lip service that both sides everything and shed tears at the funerals of those presented as undead. We cannot avoid or hide from it, but must go where power is to calculate and learn from it, mid-calculated risk: fucking with the undead as our friends, but also speaking to state disguises posturing as such (source: “A Crash-Course Introduction to Vampires (and Witches),” 2024).

(source film: Cemetery Man, 1994)

5. Capitalism achieves profit by moving money through nature; profit is built on trauma and division, wherein anything that serves profit gentrifies and decays, over and over while preying on nature. Trauma, then, cultivates strange appetites, which vary from group to group per the usual privileges and oppression as intersecting differently per case; i.e., psychosexual trauma (the regulation of state sex, terror and force) and feeding in decay but also shapeshifting and knowledge exchange vis-à-vis nature as monstrous-feminine: something to destroy by the state or defend from it using the same aesthetics. […] To avoid war and rape as system harm/generational trauma and stolen generations, etc, we must learn from the dead as something we embody through our Wisdom of the Ancients. Like a Gothic heroine in a castle, the liberatory ideal is exploration leading deeper inside—to heal from police atrocities, tokenistic exploitation, and compelled perversions occurring through feminism and genderqueer politics (and other minorities) in decay (e.g., TERFs, queer and Afronormativity, Zionism, etc), and genocide, et al (source: “A Cruel Angel’s (Modular) Thesis,” 2024).

6. Specifically keep the previous module thesis argument in mind, as I won’t have time to set it up and stress it neatly per monster type as either undead or demonic animals […] As such, bearing pain and feeding or transformation and knowledge/power exchange is anisotropic is anisotropic in animalized language; trauma makes us decay/corrupt as monstrous-feminine or fascist (token or not), albeit in ways that cause us to develop undead/demonic feeding habits that are some degree sex-positive or sex-coercive. It’s seldom clean, too, lurking in the odd grey area of the theatre stage and monster costume. Nor are these forces unique to neoliberal Capitalism, with past poets closer to death, rape and raw sexuality in ways we’re alienated from now (save in fetishized forms that serve profit). Hauntology lets us brush up with the past as nostalgic in ways that never existed and push towards Communism as aborted by capital/the project of abjection (and other Gothic theories).

You’ve probably noticed the expanding of said thesis to including undead and demonic elements over the course of the volume; this trend will only continue when we look at the creative successes of proletarian praxis (and sex, gender and identity-as-performance in Volume Three when combating tokenism) [source: Call of the Wild; or Sex Education: Trans-forming the World through the Trans, Intersex and Non-binary Mode of Being,” 2025].

These are various quotes/thesis elements that I selected arbitrarily when originally writing this new opening to Volume Three; re: six months ago; i.e., elements that stress variables tied to tokenism as a force to beware and combat while embodying Medusa: as someone to double based on prior Venus twins. I won’t stress any of these quotes, here, because they were written after this book volume was; I simply want you to have access to several on top of the explanations I just gave, with Nyx’s help. Of course, feel free to access all the book volumes and use whatever quotes or exhibits that you like; I just found these ones to be especially germane to the Praxis Volume, in hindsight—i.e., as thesis arguments wrote afterwards based on this older groundwork I’d previously laid for such things and returned to, with a basket thereof: of quotes, exhibits, and a historic backlog of thesis material while returning to where it all started (and will start again, again, again…).

The beauty of any thesis statement, then, is being able to go into an older corpus and modify it, yet spear a follow-through that endures across time insofar as liberation and revenge play out. For instance, the core, paragraph-sized goal of my project—the series abstract and breaking Capitalist Realism on the Aegis—has remained relatively constant over a million-plus words, but the thesis (skeleton) of Volume One and Volume Two’s bodies are things I’ve been able to revisit after a relative amount of time away from the drawing board.

In short, we workers can sexualize things, too, but also reinforce them in our daily lives. As such, I was able to “Wolverine” my arguments, steelmanning them (therefore Medusa) by replacing the regular bones with sturdier forms. This is standard practice in thesis writing and something had I learned gradually over time; i.e., by constantly returning to my older work, mid-reflection, effectively studying the Medusa while dancing with her as holistic study! With Volume Two, part two, for example, I didn’t have to embark upon additional thesis work; re: “Our Sweet Revenge; or, Being Ourselves While Reclaiming Anal Rape” (which Nyx [who loves anal sex and Amazonian theatrics] also appeared in, below); i.e., any more than I have to reflect on it again, here, during holistic study as I have done, have done, have done, mid-Amazonomachia. I just like doing it; Amazons rock and teaching with them is fun and effective.

Past and present, then, I have routinely figured I “might as well”; i.e., given my already having written three books before returning to this one! Each and every time, it seemed like a waste not to; i.e., especially when I had the time, resources and expertise under my belt, but also a wide group of friends to camp canon with; re: like Nyx, who I feature in “Rape Reprise” when talking about the whore’s revenge against tokenism policing nature; i.e., their “Aegis” personifies Medusa as I worship her to subvert the usual subjugation Amazons are forced to suffer and reenact! Anal back = land back as a matter of reclaimed labor through ludo-Gothic BDSM putting “rape” (ergo violence, terror and monsters) in quotes! None of this aims to confuse anyone for the Cause, instead being provided for your benefit—as a visual aid/stimulant, but also teaching device with cryptonymic potential (re: “pussy on the chainwax“)! Canon needs to be camped through what it controls; i.e., through sex with force out the Imperium of Antiquity into “antique” derelicts. What photos we leave behind are puzzles to teach with, as such. So stare and tremble!

(artist: Nyx)

To this, I wanted to cement the usual dualistic parallels, mid-Mandelbrot, but also expand on them heaven-in-a-wild-flower to account for diversity as a vital component to Gothic Communism: intersectional solidarity as a holistic response to challenging profit alienizing its usual whores to seek revenge against (re: those “of nature” to modular persecutorial degrees; e.g., witches, vampires and goblins, among others). Camping capital can’t really be done by going “bare bones,” so I used Volume Three’s “children” to build more monsters in different chapters, symposiums and essays; i.e., those that make up Volumes Zero through Two—not just a pearl, but a black pearl dense with dark data and murky origins (systemic redundancy being the key to survival, mid-passage)!

By comparison, Volume Three—as I have repeatedly explained, here and elsewhere—is largely the grain of sand before the pearl was created. Hindsight remains, of course, but referring to the ghostly essence of what eventually crystalized into the rest of my book series is important: it’s largely how you’ll be working within the mode, yourselves; i.e., how I did before I wrote my PhD, manifesto, and Monster Volume, as well as anything that comes after Sex Positivity when leaving it behind for you to find! “Look on our Works, ye Mighty!” Savor us!

(artist: Nyx)

To it, everything above amounts to reference material that came afterwards, and which you can use, moving forwards while coming yourselves; i.e., when performing and reflecting on your own proletarian praxis synthesizing mine into something closer to Gothic Communism: than I (or my friends) could manage before you. Use what remains to code your future corpses, loading their photographic likenesses with fresh data!

Rome wasn’t burned in day. Nor was capital, In keeping with my core areas of research, its transformation could occur through speedrunning and Metroidvania—meaning expressed in monomyth poetics/the Promethean Quest’s usual exchanges, and in ways where my opinions gradually changed over time (re: “Those Who Walk Away from Speedrunning,” 2025)—or it could be straight-up sex work mid-ludo-Gothic BDSM versus forms of sex work that tie into sex minus overt sexual activity. Regardless, form is secondary to function; re: flow determines function, not aesthetics. That’s how challenging tokenism works and why repeatedly returning to past ideas (and states of reflection) remains vital when reviving the Medusa as a sex-positive force; i.e., not a subjugated Amazon, but a subversive one! And yet, doing becomes a constant state of transition—something to roll in the hay (or around on the floor) with while passing whatever data on that you’re able to impart: the Medusas of today wear boy shorts, nerdy glasses and little pink fuck-me boots!

(artists: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard)

Ergo, Volume Three picks up the slack, but also is the slack; re: the spectres of the proverbial “past” as both younger and older than us, melting inside Medusa’s cauldron to make said past gayer than Marx did (with me learning from Cuwu despite them being younger than me and Marxist-Leninist, and them learning from me despite me being older than them and an-Com, above). Humanity isn’t parthenogenic, and never really “gets old” under such bio-mechanical modes of exchange; i.e., from the sense-and-sensibility psychomachia of master and apprentice to model and muse, it takes two (or more) to tango—and for which Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism is social-sexual, and rebellion more broadly a famously horrendous mess because of it: while passing past knowledge down, meaning “as divided by capital” and reflective of that division in black/white language (e.g., virgin/whore) entering the usual grey areas! Time, as Bakhtin explained per the Gothic chronotope, is organic. To look on the past as the Gothic do means to revive it per the legends and language of power and death in duality (re: dynastic primacy and hereditary rites on/off the fatal portrait)! Such is how Cuwu and I did it, or Nyx and I, or anyone else breaking state tools (thus monopolies) with their own bodies together or separate from myself. It all goes into the same cosmic cum dumpster.

I think you get the gist. Before we proceed, though, let me grant a couple last-minute points to consider when penetrating the egg (four pages). Whatever the media, rape is profit under Capitalism, which relies not just on predation, but community silence to continue itself in bad copies practicing falsehoods for the state; e.g., speedrunning as white, male and cis-het extending to streaming platform Kick’s Nazi pedophile problem but also streamers like Dr. Disrespect^[3] protected by the system; i.e., like the black penitents from Ann Radcliffe’s novels (more on streamers when we look at weird canonical nerds like Caleb Hart, Ian Kochinski and Man Box culture, in Chapter Four). So when you’re playing with rape, you must remember you’re playing with power as something to revisit and alter for workers’ benefit, aggregating on their behalf (the tradition of all dead whore’s from past generations, Marx; re: “The Eighteenth Brumaire“): while facing the system aggregating self-righteously against you; i.e., the state employing DARVO and obscurantism in defense of profit, but also literally killing the whistleblower (Second Thought’s “We All Know It’s Happening,” 2024) and always while saying “think of the women and children!” The state and its territories become, to it, an unweeded garden grown to seed, thus something for the state to “weed” while keeping its pimp-like hold on things in ways that tokenize and resist tokenization in equal measure:

(artist: Rae Moon)

Simply put, profit defends itself, thus rape through violence and lies, but also costumes, bodies and masks; i.e., per my PhD thesis statement, Capitalism sexualizes everything—doing so by tokenizing outwards to police and harvest labor through nature-as-monstrous-feminine; e.g., hairy pussies (above). In turn, those touched by trauma tend to advertise it (that “goth” look) as something to play with, weird attracting weird. This includes playing with our abusers’ terror weapons; i.e., as things to reclaim through our own cryptonymy’s masks and costumes, boundaries and barriers; re: during the whore’s paradox/the paradox of rape unfolding while playing with “rape” in quotes; re: the anal Amazon thesis being “land back” and “body back” by taking our labor and rights back from the state per the whore’s revenge against profit (from the Demon Module):

(artist: Aria Rain)

First, capital sexualizes everything to rape nature in modular terror language, including Amazons and anal; i.e., the world under Capitalism arranges heteronormatively in service to capital, whose Cartesian/settler-colonial structure rapes nature through said language; e.g., Amazons being used classically to control women by Ancient Athenians, not free them; re (from a few pages back): “The state controls sex and gender in monstrous-feminine language because these are where power (and trauma) are found […] their ideas of power revolve around ideas of state revenge also dressed up: the pimp dominating nature-as-monstrous-feminine, doubling and dominating it through tokenized double standards; e.g., anal sex [and Amazons].” The state only tolerates the problematic love of Amazons and anal when their challenge (to the ancient canonical laws) is nominal; i.e., provided their counterfeits serve profit in canonical terror language that furthers abjection. As something to combine, but also canonize in different performances, anal is a place and parlance of trauma to give and receive through tokenized enforcers dressed up as warriors—Amazons being a half-real theatrical device forever trapped between genuine rebellion and false, targeting vulnerable body parts in vulnerable areas (e.g., the bathroom). Things like Amazons and anal, then, become canonically binarized to best give or receive state force (mainly police violence) pursuant to profit. To challenge profit and Capitalist Realism on and offstage, workers must camp state terror inside of itself—anisotropically with Amazons and anal to reverse terror/counterterror with subversive irony during liminal expression (source: “Our Sweet Revenge; or, Being Ourselves While Reclaiming Anal Rape, mid-Amazonomachia,” 2024).

Literal assholes aside, such forbidden zones extend readily enough to overlapping persecution networks pursuant to blood libel, sodomy and witch hunts; re: profit achieved via Cartesian thought, heteronormativity and settler colonialism (and other state tools) enforcing the ancient canonical laws into the nuclear model—i.e., as it currently exists, post-Rome but haunted by “Rome” as hauntologically something to quell or revive—among other modular-yet-intersecting forms of persecution language: monsters that, so often, tie to the body and its labor as sexualized by the state for profit (thus alienation, rape and ultimately genocide as unfolding per the usual cyclical patterns and “black” left-behinds; re: the infernal concentric pattern, Cycle of Kings, Shadow of Pygmalion, etc).

As a matter of synthesizing catharsis, mid-praxis, the only way to fight that process (of abjection) is to go to the half-real space where exploitation and liberation both call home and anisotropically flow power towards workers; re: as monstrous-feminine during the dialectic of the alien. Anything that can be pimped by the state is a whore to police through monomythic forms, which we camp to survive using what we have as whores (offshoots of the Big Whore, Medusa). That is the whore’s power to salvage from profit, on the Aegis: an undead, demonic and/or animalistic egregore to conjure up during the liminal hauntology of war and speak to what was denied in the past; i.e., which we can revive in various forms of “past” through ourselves: to pass on, thus honor the Medusa and nature, as monstrous-feminine having its revenge (female/white or not) against profit and the state! Such revenge has a home to rise from, a burial ground that—in keeping with Gothic—is also an “almost holy” graveyard that stretches wide to swallow you!

(artist: Kitty Has One)

The Gothic is a quest, one that famously searches for the Numinous, which the Medusa—as the ghost of the counterfeit—is; re: the black queen to turn the world, as capital has arranged it, upside-down! Beyond Faustian bargains (re: “Summoning Demons“), this reckoning happens during Promethean Quests from Mary Shelley onwards (re: “Making Demons“). To it, there are no kings or queens under Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism, hence no gods or masters of the traditional, vertical sort; it’s a group effort—one bravely made to gradually restore horizontal stability to a devastated world ravished by capital on all registers. By challenging tokenism in neo-medieval variations of as(s)ymmetrical warfare, we’re not just whores to pimp/slaves to be productive “to the grind,” getting’ busy for the owner class; we’re allowed to hang loose/self-define through a multi-purpose (and multi-media) approach to our lives: something to look upon and savor as one does a goddess! Love feels good, as does having the Satanic power to say and show it (as avatars of the Medusa) however we all agree upon! This pandemonic covenant is collective, gooey.

To it, monopolies are a myth only once we break them on the Aegis! So be bold when doing so, your own Gothic homecomings living ever onwards! Tremble with a power the state sees in us, which we paradoxically take back, mid-exposure! Through the cryptonymy process, nudity is our armor! And while our past becomes a Gorgon-esque poetry to revisit and endlessly play with, each return remains unique and fun; re from Percy Shelley to me (from “The Quest for Power”):

I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said—”Two vast and shapely buns of stone

Thrust up in the desert. … Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a peerless visage sighs, whose smile,

And pillow lip, and smirk of warm delight,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that enjoyed them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

‘My name is Ozymandias, Queen of queens;

Look on my Ass, ye Mighty, and despair!’

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away (source).

In keeping with Medusa, life and death are two sides of the same coin, the Gothic is a bad echo on purpose. However surreal (re: Giger), use it to make a better world while rising from the ashes of past attempts!

Your Commy Mommy (and all her friends speaking through her),

—Persephone van der Waard

(artist: Nyx)

Onto “Foreplay: Introduction, Before the Plunge, and Thanking Harmony (again)“!

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

[1a]  Beyond footnotes and editor’s notes, many of these revisions are signposts; i.e., quality-of-life stuff that help viewers transition from one (sub)chapter to another without adding any new content (or pointing to such content elsewhere beyond this book volume). Even so, the length from 4/17/2025 to 5/7/2025 has increased from 822 pages, 243,010 words and 394 images, to 836 pages, 278,121 words and 579 images (subject to change)! That’s over 30,000 additional words alone!

[1b] Far less than Volume Two, which similar to the manifesto actually experienced multiple expansions (e.g., the Poetry Module) and essays prior to its final release.

[2] Re (from Volume Zero): Under Capitalist Realism, Hell is a place that always appears on Earth [or an Earth- like double]—a black fortress threatening state hegemony during the inevitable decay of a colonial body. Its widening state of exception must then be entered by the hero during the liminal hauntology of war as a repeatable, monomythic excursion—a franchise to subdue during military optimism sold as a childhood exercise towards “playing war” in fantastical forms; e.g., Castlevania or Metroid. Conjure a Radcliffean menace inside the Imperial Core, then meet it with American force (source: “Scouting the Field”).

[3] Hasan Abi’s “Kick Is Falling Apart” (2024) and “Why Dr. Disrespect Was Banned,” (2023).

“All the World” is a blog-style book promotion, originally inspired by those done with Harmony Corrupted and Romantic Rose for Volume Two; re: “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 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. This specific promo post includes Volume One’s table of contents (and hyperlinks to each post), followed by the book disclaimer.

Further Reading: As of 3/13/2025, I’ve given every book volume/(sub)module its own promotion series. Access all of them, here.

Volume Three is out (5/9/2025)! Go to my book’s 1-page promo to download the latest version of the PDF (which will contain additions/corrections the original blog posts will not have)!

Permissions: Any publicly available images are exhibited for purposes of education, transformation and critique, thus fall under Fair Use; private nude material and collabs with models are specifically shared with permission from the original model(s). For more details about artist permissions, refer to the book disclaimer found either at the bottom of this page or on its own webpage.

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.

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

Contents (for Volume Three) 

Volume Three, unlike Volume Two, lacks separate modules or sub-volumes. Instead, it is entirely self-contained. Even so, its material still divides into different sections, whose main three I’ve outlined ahead of time. The Praxis Volume divides in two halves and five larger chapters:

Volume Three, part one lays out sex positivity and sex coercion—but also the liminal areas between them—in a two-part introduction, followed by three chapters:

• • “Opening“ and “Foreplay“ set the table, preparing the reader for a 2025 release of this older book; i.e., written originally in 2022 and early 2023 (with some minor changes first in 2024 and now in 2025).

• • Chapter One focuses on sex positivity and the “creative successes” of proletarian praxis—how Gothic Communism, when correctly performed, cultivates empathy under Capitalism through mutual consent, informed consumption, de facto education and descriptive sexuality as things to materially imagine (often through ironic parody and “perspective” pastiche) through Gothic poetics.

• • Chapter Two explores their dialectical foil, sex coercion, whereupon Capitalism “zombifies” consumers into “lobotomizing” themselves and others, resulting in abject, fetishizing witch-hunts, toxic love and criminal sexuality as historical-material outcomes; i.e., that seek to control sex and thoughts/cultural attitudes about sex, including the sexist, obfuscating ambivalence of Gothic canon’s coercive BDSM, fetishes and kink.

• • Chapter Three enters the “grey area” of cultural appreciation, examining: the culturally appreciative, sexually descriptive irony of Gothic counterculture’s reverse abjection with sex-positive BDSM, kink and fetishization; as well as asexuality, queer-/homonormative gatekeeping and the ambiguities of trans, non-binary, intersex, and drag existence, but also their assorted discriminations begot from weird canonical nerds and the canonical media that turns them into harmful bigots.

Volume Three, part two concerns sex positivity versus sex coercion. It contains Chapters Four and Five plus the Conclusion, which concerns the creative successes of proletarian praxis versus state praxis. Time to fight!

• • Chapter Four explores sexism and other bigotries within a gradient of canonical moderacy and reactionary politics in popular, sexualized media—TERF hauntologies, sublimated war pastiche, girl/war bosses, and queer tokenism at large.

• • Chapter Five seeks to provide lasting solutions based on emotionally/Gothically intelligent activists who can detect, recognize and separate all of the above when creating their own cryptonymic material, all while enacting Gothic Communism, outing state proponents, and living in a brave new world of sexy “awakened” monsters: the liminally subversive/transgressive zombies, ghosts, vampires, witches, Amazons, etc.
  • “Pussy on the Chainwax!” and “Kicks After Six” close out the book, giving the reader two basic choices: a) to serve the state and Capitalist Realism, bringing about the actual end of the world, or b) to face the perceived “end of the world” in order to stop of the Promethean cycle (and ultimate desolate conclusion) of Capitalism.

These sections essentially function as a module would for Volume Two, save that they operate deliberately inside one book volume rather than dividing it up into separate modules (a tenable goal, given my thesis volume is quite a bit shorter than Volume Twos various modules); i.e., Volume Three takes Sex Positivity‘s entire thesis argument from Volume Zero, simplified arguments from Volume One (“the basics”), and applied poetic-historical elements from Volume Two, and combines it all into praxis; i.e., regarding the creative successes thereof, regarding the proletarian side of things. It is my oldest volume, meaning I wrote it first and—in keeping with my usual roundabout, oft-backwards style—am suitably releasing it last. It is my most conversational volume, hence written for daily synthesis grasping at theory as an afterthought to tangible results.

Cover model: Harmony Corrupted

Volume Summary

Volume Three: Praxis, parts one and two combine Volume Zero’s complex theory, Volume One’s simplified theory/synthetic model, and Volume Two’s monster history and application; i.e., as something to challenge the state by fostering our own creative successes of proletarian praxis, and whose mutual consent, informed consumption and informed consent, sex-positive de facto education, descriptive sexuality and cultural appreciation boil down to sex positivity (and liberation) versus sex coercion while developing Gothic Communism (with a huge focus on resisting tokenization; e.g., TERFs).

In other words, Volume Three covers the informed, intersectionally continuous application of successful proletarian praxis as we reinterpret the Gothic past pushing for universal liberation. Striking a careful, intuitive balance between pure theory and taught instruction, its introduction/summation takes Volume Zero’s theoretical backbone, Volume One’s simplified teaching approach and Volume Two’s past lessons, then outlines the dialectical-material objectives through which to apply our central Gothic theories—i.e., in a dialectical-material way using updated, posthumanist models (expanded beyond Cartesian thought) in order to achieve Gothic Communism one step at a time. This includes the creative successes of proletarian praxis, which the volume explores in relation to state forces who resist their transformative power to keep things the same; i.e., the state vs workers, generally by pitting the latter against each other. A huge part of proletarian praxis, then, involves a gradual development of emotional/Gothic intelligence and class/cultural awareness during our updated teaching approach and labor negotiations when expressed during ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., to counterattack state forces in service to our larger goals—our six Gothic-Marxist tenets—thwarting Capitalist Realism.

approximate volume length (“): ~282,000 words/837 pages and ~586 unique images

(artists: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard)

Setting the Stage (opening, outline and preface)

Opening Summary

The opening and preface to Volume Thee (written in 2025), as well as some additional paratextual materials not released (outside of the PDF files) until this point.

Posts

• -2. “Appetizers; or, Paratextual Documents for Volumes One through Three“: Various smaller and less essential paratextual documents (versus more essential ones; re: “Paratextual (Gothic) Documents“); i.e., those included inside the volume PDFs released after my PhD. Length: ~23 pages.
• -1a. “Opening to Volume Three: Regarding Tokenism and Fighting It” (feat. Nyx and Cuwu): The opening for the entire volume. Returns to Volume Three after three years, considering how it was written originally and modified over time, but also its primary focus since Sex Positivity started in July 2022; i.e., dealing first with TERFs and then other forms of normativity that overlap with token feminism; e.g., Afronormativity. Length: ~22 pages.
• 0. “Foreplay: Praxis Volume Outline, part one” (section opening): A small batch of considerations and last-minute business before jumping in. Opening Length: ~2 pages.
  • 0a. “With Harmony’s Help: Addressing Volume Three’s Grand Emptiness and Ambitions through a Good Friend” (feat. Harmony Corrupted—included with section opening): A 2025 addendum that acknowledges the state of Volume Three—i.e., after returning to it, three years after starting it, and making various small changes to it, but mostly keeping it the same—and, at the same time, paying homage to Harmony Corrupted, my greatest muse and one of Sex Positivity‘s biggest inspirations after it began. Length: ~5 pages.
  • 0b. “Introduction: Dialectical Materialism (with Monsters—included with section opening)“ Takes Volume Zero’s theory, Volume One’s synthesis and Volume Two’s past lessons on Gothic poetics (history and application) to outline the objectives by which to apply our project’s central Gothic theories; i.e., in a dialectical-material way using updated, posthumanist models (expanded beyond Cartesian thought) to better achieve Gothic Communism one step at a time. Length: ~10 pages.
  • 0c. “Before the Plunge: A Dialectical-Material Summation of Gothic Communism’s Execution (in Opposition—included with section opening)“: Outlines the dialectical-material execution through which proletarian praxis becomes possible, mid-opposition. Length: ~14 pages.

Part one: Sex Positivity and Sex Coercion

Opening Summary

Volume Three, part one; re: “Foreplay” (above): Lays out sex positivity and sex coercion—but also the liminal areas between them—in a two-part introduction, followed by three chapters: Opening Length: ~1 page.

• 1. Chapter One: Sex Positivity. “‘The Seeds of Rebellion’—Sex Positivity and the Tools of the Trade” (chapter opening—included with section opening); re: Focuses on sex positivity and the “creative successes” of proletarian praxis—how Gothic Communism, when correctly performed, cultivates empathy under Capitalism through mutual consent, informed consumption, de facto education and descriptive sexuality as things to materially imagine (often through ironic parody and “perspective” pastiche) through Gothic poetics. Opening Length: ~2 pages.
  • 1a. “Illustrating Mutual Consent: Empathy” (included with section opening): Introduces the first of the creative successes of proletarian praxis, and considers how empathy factors into illustrating mutual consent on all registers; i.e., through popular media of different kinds discussing empathy as something to illustrate ourselves; e.g., the “draw me like your French girls” scene from Titanic (1996) and the art lecture scene from Sense8 (2011). Length: ~19 pages.
  • 1b. “Half-Real: Recognizing And Performing Empathy“(feat. Meowing from Hell and Sean Young): A follow-up to “Illustrating Mutual Consent” that focuses on empathy as something to recognize, mid-illustration; i.e., as “half-real,” vis-à-vis Jesper Juul’s idea of “the realm between fiction and the rules” as further taken, by me, between fiction and non-fiction, on and offstage; e.g., between sex workers like myself and Meowing from Hell, but also actress Sean Young and her own abuse on and off the Blade Runner (1982) set. Length: ~35 pages.
  • 1c. “Informed (Ironic) Consumption and De Facto Educators Using Parody and Parallel Space“: Explores informed consumption according to informed/mutual consent as enacted by sex workers; i.e., as de facto (extracurricular) sex educators educating through iconoclastic art, but especially parody and parallel space; e.g., Monty Python, H.R. Giger and New Order. Length: ~17 pages.
  • 1d. “Reversing Abjection: Describing Sexuality vs Prescribing Sexual Modesty“: Discusses reversing abjection vs prescribing sexual modesty in Gothic stories; i.e., on the same half-real stages; e.g., Alien and its own 1970s rape fantasies borrowed from older times and transported into newer retro-future ones. Length: ~15 pages.
  • 1e. “Toxic Schlock Syndrome; or, an Early Stab at Cryptonymy: the Fur(r)tive Rebellion of Amazons, Body Hair and Whistleblowers in Duality” (feat. Mercedes the Muse, Mugiwara, Mercy from Overwatch, and Autumn Ivy): Our holistic examination of the above ideas; i.e., combining them cryptonymically through body hair and whistleblower counterculture/schlock media (re: Mercedes)—but also Amazons per the theme of toxic sugar/sex workers (re: Autumn Ivy/Wolfhead at Night) and GNC bodies (re: Mugiwara)—to conceptualize development: as an active, ironic, playful means of critical engagement/thought and poetic expression conducive to developing Gothic Communism in praxial opposition. Length: ~69 pages (nice).
  • 1g. “Love Is a Long Road: Summarizing the Rest of the Volume” (included with “Toxic Schlock Syndrome”): A short summary of the remaining book chapters and their content. Length: ~2 pages.

• 2. Chapter Two: Sex Coercion. “‘Under the Influence’—Sex Coercion under Zombie Capitalism, Including Bad Drugs and Voluntary Lobotomy” (chapter opening); re: Explores sex positivity’s dialectical foil, sex coercion, whereupon Capitalism “zombifies” consumers into “lobotomizing” themselves and others, resulting in abject, fetishizing witch-hunts, toxic love and criminal sexuality as historical-material outcomes; i.e., that seek to control sex and thoughts/cultural attitudes about sex, including the sexist, obfuscating ambivalence of Gothic canon’s coercive BDSM, fetishes and kink. Opening Length: ~4 pages.
  • 2a. “Witch Cops and Victims: Fetishized Witch hunters and -Hunted in the Ever-growing Police State” (feat. Ion Fury, T2 and Reinhard Heydrich—included with chapter opening): Introduces the idea of token minorities in Gothic language; i.e., witch cops operating in bad faith. Length: ~23 pages.
  • 2b. “‘Which Witch?’—’What is a Witch?’ part one: An Example of Proletarian Witches in The Last of Us“ (2023; also feat. Myth and Everquest): A close-read of the gay couple from 2023’s The Last of Us, considering the proletarian aspects to queer witches living under a decaying police state/zombie apocalypse (essentially a precursor to the “Bad Dreams” section from the Undead Module). Length: ~11 pages.
  • 2c. “Ruling through Fear: Dogma and Economics” (included with “Which Witch?”): Briefly introduces the neoliberal execution of the Protestant ethic; i.e., through fear and dogma as a socio-economic model, one canonically guided by guilty (demonic) pleasures and coercive wish fulfillment. ~8 pages.
  • 2d. “‘Real Life’: Toxic Love and Criminal Sexuality in True Crime” (feat. Killing Stalking, Jeffery Dahmer and Ted Bundy): Considers toxic love, criminal hauntology and the demon lover (re: Ann Radcliffe); i.e., as worshipped through said hauntologies—specifically out of the 1970s and into neoliberalism’s endless tenure pimping such things on a 24-hour news cycle. Length: ~15 pages.
  • 2e. “Gothic Ambivalence: Canonical Torture in the Internet Age; or the Wish Fulfillment of Guilty Pleasure, Bad Play and Sex-Coercive Demon BDSM” (feat. Hellraiser): Considers, despite the prevalence of demon BDSM in canon, its Gothic ambivalence; i.e., in ways that we can take and demonstrably play with: as demonic vis-à-vis guilty pleasure and its wish fulfillment, mid-liminal-expression; e.g., Clive Barker’s Cenobites from Hellraiser (1987) into more recent examples like Lilith from Diablo IV (2024). Length: ~26 pages.

• 3. Chapter Three: Liminality. “‘A Zone… of Danger!’—Fifty Shades of Gay (Area)” (chapter opening); re: Enters the “grey area” of cultural appreciation, examining: the culturally appreciative, sexually descriptive irony of Gothic counterculture’s reverse abjection with sex-positive BDSM, kink and fetishization; as well as asexuality, queer-/homonormative gatekeeping and the ambiguities of trans, non-binary, intersex, and drag existence, but also their assorted discriminations begot from weird canonical nerds and the canonical media that turns them into harmful bigots. Opening Length: ~3 pages.
  • 3a. “Exquisite Torture in the Internet Age: The Appreciative Irony of Gothic Iconoclasm; or, the Subversive Power of Good Play and Sex-Positive Demon BDSM during Counterculture Performance Art” (included with chapter opening): Explores playing with demon BDSM iconoclastically for the first time in this book series, eventually evolving into ludo-Gothic BDSM (re: from my PhD, onwards; see: “Concerning Rape Play“). Length: ~23 pages.
  • 3b. “Selling Sex, SWERFs and Un(der)paid Sex Work“: Explores the basic mechanisms of selling sex (as something to play with and perform, using Gothic poetics); i.e., vis-à-vis SWERFs and the generally underpaid nature of said activities and how art portrays them as automatically sexual despite there being an ace component; re: public nudism as often coming out of canon as something to camp; e.g., Art Frahm. Length: ~16 pages.
  • 3c. “Crash Course: An Introduction to Asexuality and Demisexuality“: Having introduced an “ace” potential during Gothic poetics merged with public nudism/sex work at large, we’ll now unpack asexuality and demisexuality versus sexual expression; i.e., on the same larger gradient. Length: ~8 pages.
  • 3d. “Queer-/Homonormativity in Sex-Centric Canon” (included with “Crash Course”): Explores the normative elements to queer-coded stories in popular media. Length: ~13 pages.
  • 3e. “Sexualized Queerness and Ace Voices in Sex-Normalized (Fan/Meta)Fiction” (included with “Crash Course”): Considers queer normativity as sexualized, with ace voices navigating said sexualization in various kinds of fan/meta fiction (e.g., Harry Potter). Length: ~13 pages.
  • 3f. “Defined Through Sex: Sex Normativity in Popular Media” (included with “Crash Course”): Considers the amatonormative side to sex as normalized in popular media; e.g., Wentworth (2013), Heartbreak High (2022), or Game of Thrones (2009). Length: ~12 pages.
  • 3g. “Pigtail Power and Crossdressing: Sex Repulsion in Gothic/Queer Narratives” (feat. Wednesday and Barbarian): A close-read, one that considers the “ace” ability of pigtailed Radcliffean Gothic heroines; i.e., to explore psychosexual trauma while navigating its homely perils from the outside, in; re: during the liminal hauntology of war. Length: ~12 pages.
  • 3h. “Artistic Nudity and Asexual Bodies/Relationships in Art; Gay Artists” (feat. It’s Perfectly Normal, As Good as It Gets, and Tilda Swinton): Considers how artistic nudity and asexual bodies/relationships help form special bonds between workers; i.e., between (historically gay) men and feminine/female models. Length: ~11 pages.
  • 3i. “Inside the Man Box; or, Patriarchal, Nerdy Hatred Against Transgender/Non-binary People, Intersexuality and Drag” (feat. Caleb Hart, She-Hulk, twinks/femboys, goblins, and more—subchapter opening): Takes the above ideas and considers the etiology (causes) of GNC genocide under Capitalism as something to interrogate through our relationships; e.g., trans, enby and intersex people/drag performers, whose monstrous-feminine relationships (re: twinks, femboys, etc) are informed by medieval art and Gothic fiction; i.e., under capital as a system that sexualizes its victims, teaching future police agents to neglect, attack or otherwise abuse those parties for profit: within the Man Box and “prison sex” mentality furthering the Shadow of Pygmalion’s patriarchal influence to harm nature as monstrous-feminine. Opening Length: ~2 pages.
    • 3i1. ” part one: “Ontological Ambiguities” (feat. twinks, femboys and shunga—included with subchapter opening): Examine some of the ontological, monstrous-feminine ambiguities that prompt stochastic terrorists to attack the queer community and their representations in popular media (commenting on hauntological, Gothic variants wherever applicable). Length: ~16 pages.
    • 3i2. ” part two: “Canonical Discrimination in Videogames, Including Fan Art and Speedrunner/Streamer Culture” (feat. Caleb Hart, She-Hulk and goblins): Examines the attackers’ problematic, Faustian education that leads to an attacker’s mindset: through traditional modes of male education learned by weird canonical nerds like Caleb Hart through sexist (monomythic) videogames and gamer “Man Box” culture, which didactically appropriates twinks, catboys/femboys, etc. Length: ~35 pages.
    • 3i3. ” part three: “Poison was the Cure: On Goblins, Being a Weird Nerd and Trans Cryptonymy as a Monstrous Antidote to Bigots” (feat. Glenn the Goblin, Ms. Chalice from Cuphead, Tolkien’s Orcs and Goblins, and more): Takes a breather from canonical praxis and consider a defense that weird queer nerds can adopt when challenging the status quo, specifically my approach to goblins (and videogames) within iconoclastic media as something to synthesize ourselves. Length: ~26 pages.
    • 3i4. ” part four: “Obliterating Phoebe: In the Shadow of Pygmalion, or the Weird Nerds’ Canonical Praxis at Large“: Examines how the world of canonical media—but especially e-sports—has informed bigoted attitudes in videogame culture, including how the elite are currently enabling these attacks in the predominantly male world of competitive e-sports; i.e., as “dominated” by sexist men similar to Caleb Hart obsessed with making their mark as he has: being “the best” in ways that overwrite the history of everyone else (we’ll focus on feminist moderacy and female/queer bigotries in Chapter Four). Length: ~43 pages.

Part two: Sex Positivity versus Sex Coercion

Opening Summary

Volume Three, part two/”Hard Dicking: Praxis Volume Outline, part two” (section opening): Concerns sex positivity versus sex coercion. It contains Chapters Four and Five plus the Conclusion, which concerns the creative successes of proletarian praxis versus state praxis. Time to fight! Opening Length: ~2 page.

• 4. Chapter Four: Bad Faith. “‘Rise, my pretties! Rise!’—TERFs and Other Flying Monkey ‘Witch Cops’ and Girl War Bosses in Nerd Culture vis-à-vis Neoliberalism, Fascism and Genocide” (chapter opening—included with section opening); re: Explores sexism and other bigotries within a gradient of canonical moderacy and reactionary politics in popular, sexualized media; i.e., TERF hauntologies, sublimated war pastiche, girl/war bosses, and queer tokenism at large. Opening Length: ~3 pages.
  • 4a. “Ladies First; or, the Grift of False Rebellion: A Brief Summary of the Regressive Amazonomachia of Girls Trapped inside the Man Box (Girl Bosses and War Bosses—included with section opening)“: Introduces subjugated Amazons and witch cops through classic female examples, but also how I’ve grappled with/camped said devices and actors in the past (re: Blxxd Bunny and Glenn the goblin). Length: ~13 pages.
  • 4b. “A War Hauntology Primer—’What is a Witch?’ part two: Nerdy Patriarchs, ‘Real Men’ and So-Called Male ‘Witches,’ including Liver King but also Shonen and Bishonen Pastiche” (feat. Mega Man X, Liver King and Caleb Hart): Considers male variants of the witch cop, but especially warrior personas of a fantastical, retro-future design. Length: ~17 pages.
  • 4c. “Kento’s Dream: A Feast for Crows; or, Echoes of Fascism and Zombie Voltron within 1980s Neoliberal War Pastiche” (feat. The Ronin Warriors—included with “Nerdy Patriarchs”): A further examination of witch-cop hauntologies beyond Mega Man, but from the same neoliberal period exporting Japanese media to America: The Ronin Warriors. Length: ~14 pages.
  • 4d. “‘What is a Witch?’ part three: Attack of the Bad-Faith, Pussyhat Feminist Undead/Demons; or, the Fascism-in-Disguise of “Witch” Girl Bosses, Male Gatekeepers, and the Gender-Critical Movement” (feat. Ian Kochinski): Goes beyond popular media to consider some of its bad actors/their disguise pastiche. Length: ~44 pages.
  • 4e. “Selling War as Sacred: Sublimated War Pastiche and Gender-Critical War Bosses in Overwatch 2, the Heteronormative Myth of the “Good War” in Saving Private Ryan, New Order, and Stonewalling Genderqueer Alternatives“: Presents a popular argument offered by bad actors in and out of popular media: war as sacred, thus something to sell under the Protestant ethic to maintain Capitalist Realism. Length: ~39 pages.
  • 4f. “Accommodated/Assimilated Minorities, part one: My Story of Trans-on-Trans Violence; or, the Abuse of a Trans Women Sex Worker by AFAB Sex Workers (Cis or Trans)“: A recounting of my own experiences suffering witch cops—specifically cis-female sex workers punching down at me in May 2023. Length: ~8 pages.
  • 4g. ” part two: “Trans TERFs, NERFs, and Queer Bosses” (feat. Natalie Wynn—included with “My Story”): My classic and formative interrogation of token trans actors, specifically Natalie Wynn, aka Contrapoints; i.e., whose NERF “gobstopper masks” (re: disguise pastiche) were critiqued initially by Essence of Thought and further examined by myself through Essence of Thought’s arguments. Length: ~18 pages.

• 5. Chapter Five: “Rebellious Subterfuge. ‘Rise up, comrade zombies!’—The Revolutionary Undead’s Covert Activism/Cryptonymy during Liminal Counter-Expression” (chapter opening); re: Seeks to provide lasting solutions based on emotionally/Gothically intelligent activists who can detect, recognize and separate all of the above when creating their own cryptonymic material, all while enacting Gothic Communism, outing state proponents, and living in a brave new world of sexy “awakened” monsters: the liminally subversive/transgressive zombies, ghosts, vampires, witches, Amazons, etc. Opening Length: ~6 pages.
  • 5a. “A Plan of Attack: Escaping the Man Box” (including with the chapter opening): Considers the basic idea of escaping the Man Box, hence Capitalist Realism; i.e., on the same stage populated by bad actors (re: witch cops). Length: ~11 pages.
  • 5b. “Transgressive Nudism; or, Flashing Those with Power (re: Cryptonymy’s Origins)“: Introduces public nudism (and its buffers, online); i.e., as a vital instrument to practicing revolutionary cryptonymy on the Aegis. Length: ~33 pages.
  • 5c. “‘Borrowed Robes,’ or Countering Nation Pastiche’s Sublimated War and Rape with Revolutionary Cryptonymy and Liminal Monster Porn in the Internet Age” (subchapter opening): Considers the idea of performative disguise, said borrowed robes conducive to revolutionary cryptonymy in a variety of forms. Opening Length: ~9 pages.
    • 5c1. ” part one: “Proletarian Warrior Moms and Breeding Kinks” (feat. Nyx—included with subchapter opening): Explores one of my favorite monsters—Amazons, but also the rape fantasies (and fears) they classically embody and which revolutionary actions can gleefully subvert canon with. Length: ~18 pages.
    • 5c2. “part two: “Moe/Ahegao, Incest, and Eco-Fascism in Japanese Exports” (feat. Street Fighter, Dragon Ball and Kubo and the Two Strings): Explores various theatrical devices of rape play that workers must camp; e.g., Moe/Ahegao, Incest, and Eco-Fascism; i.e., as they’re exported to American from Japan in the neoliberal age. Length: ~23 pages.
  • 5d. “Rockstars: From Rock ‘n Roll Fans and Jimmi Hendrix’ Penis to Horror Movie Special Effects” (feat., Cynthia Plaster Caster): Sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll are an ancient form of protest; i.e., as reclaimed bread and circus, which this section considers through the social-sexual embodiment/reenactment of such things: the human body and memento mori. Length: ~15 pages.
  • 5e. “Stand to Fight, then Raise Your Fist and ‘Bow’ to Duck the Imperial Boomerang: Further Expressions of Ironic Girl War Bosses, Sexy War, and Gender Irony“: Delves into more examples of revolutionary cryptonymy with which to protest through war-like imagery and riot. Length: ~34 pages.
  • 5f. “Sexist Ire: Persecuting Iconoclasts (and Iconoclastic Vice Characters; feat. Elphaba Thropp)“: Warns of iconoclasm’s performative risk, and how reclaimed vice characters are punished without irony by state actors doubling our own subversive approaches. Length: ~10 pages.
• 6. “Pussy on the Chainwax!” (series conclusion—included with “Sexist Ire”): Closes the book series out, giving the reader two basic choices: a) to serve the state and Capitalist Realism, bringing about the actual end of the world, or b) to face the perceived “end of the world” in order to stop of the Promethean cycle (and ultimate desolate conclusion) of Capitalism. Length: ~9 pages.
• 7. “Kicks After Six: Always Another Castle” (included with “Sexist Ire”): A 2025 reflection on the conclusion of Sex Positivity as a book series. Length: ~2 pages.

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

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!

Disclaimer

(disclaimer exhibit: Artist: Harmony Corrupted, who provided me with various materials from her Fansly account to use [with her permission] in my book, including cum photos. For those of legal age who enjoy Harmony’s work and want to see more than this website provides, consider subscribing to her Fansly account and then ordering a custom/tipping through her Ko-Fi. You won’t be disappointed!)

“If it was not good, it was true; if it was not artistic, it was sincere; if it was in bad taste, it was on the side of life.”

—Henry Miller, on criticism and the Supreme-Court-level lawsuit he received for writing The Tropic of Cancer (1934)

Regarding This Book’s Artistic/Pornographic Nudity and Sexual Content: Sex Positivity thoroughly discusses sexuality in popular media, including fetishes, kinks, BDSM, Gothic material, and general sex work; the illustrations it contains have been carefully curated and designed to demonstrate my arguments. It also considers pornography to be art, examining the ways that sex-positive art makes iconoclastic statements against the state. As such, Sex Positivity contains visual examples of sex-positive/sex-coercive artistic nudity borrowed from publicly available sources to make its educational/critical arguments. Said nudity has been left entirely uncensored for those purposes. While explicitly criminal sexual acts, taboos and obscenities are discussed herein, no explicit illustrations thereof are shown, nor anything criminal; i.e., no snuff porn, child porn or revenge porn. It does examine things generally thought of as porn that are unironically violent. Examples of uncensored, erotic artwork and sex work are present, albeit inside exhibits that critique the obscene potential (from a legal standpoint) of their sexual content: “ultimate sexual acts, normal or perverted, actual or simulated, masturbation, excretory functions, lewd exhibition of the genitals, or sado-masochistic sexual abuse” (source: Justice.gov). For instance, there is an illustrated example of uncensored semen—a “breeding kink” exhibit with zombie unicorns and werewolves (exhibit 87a)—that I’ve included to illustrate a particular point, but its purposes are ultimately educational in nature.

The point of this book isn’t to be obscene for its own sake, but to educate the broader public (including teenagers*) about sex-positive artwork and labor historically treated as obscene by the state. For the material herein to be legally considered obscene it would have to simultaneously qualify in three distinct ways (aka the “Miller” test):

• appeal to prurient interests (i.e., an erotic, lascivious, abnormal, unhealthy, degrading, shameful, or morbid interest in nudity, sex, or excretion)
• attempt to depict or describe sexual conduct in a patently offensive way (i.e., ultimate sexual acts, normal or perverted, actual or simulated, masturbation, excretory functions, lewd exhibition of the genitals, or sado-masochistic sexual abuse)
• lack serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value

Taken as a whole, this book discusses debatably prurient material in an academic manner, depicting and describing sexual conduct in a non-offensive way for the express purpose of education vis-à-vis literary-artistic-political enrichment.

*While this book was written for adults—provided to them through my age-gated website—I don’t think it should be denied from curious teenagers through a supervising adult. The primary reason I say this (apart from the trauma-writing sections, which are suitably intense and grave) is that the academic material can only be simplified so far and teenagers probably won’t understand it entirely (which is fine; plenty of books are like that—take years to understand more completely). As for sexually-developing readers younger than 16 (ages 10-15), I honestly think there are far more accessible books that tackle the same basic subject matter more quickly at their reading level. All in all, this book examines erotic art and sex positivity as an alternative to the sex education currently taught (or deliberately not taught) in curricular/extracurricular spheres. It does so in the hopes of improving upon canonical tutelage through artistic, dialectical-material analysis. 

Fair Use: This book is non-profit, and its artwork is meant for education, transformation and critique. For those reasons, the borrowed materials contained herein fall under Fair Use. All sources come from popular media: movies, fantasy artist portfolios, cosplayer shoots, candid photographs, and sex worker catalogs intended for public viewing. Private material has only been used with a collaborating artist’s permission (for this book—e.g., Blxxd Bunny‘s OF material or custom shoots; or as featured in a review of their sex work on my website with their consent already given from having done past work together—e.g., Miss Misery).

Concerning the Exhibit Numbers and Parenthetical Dates: I originally wrote this book as one text, not four volumes. Normally I provide a publication year per primary text once per text—e.g., “Alien (1979)”—but this would mean having to redate various texts in Volumes One, Two and Three after Volume Zero. I have opted out of doing this. Likewise, the exhibit numbers are sequential for the entire book, not per volume; references to a given exhibit code [exhibit 11b2 or 87a] will often refer to exhibits not present in the current volume. I have not addressed this in the first edition of my book, but might assemble a future annotated list in a second edition down the road.

Concerning Hyperlinks: Those that make the source obvious or are preceded by the source author/title will simply be supplied “as is.” This includes artist or book names being links to themselves, but also mere statements of fact, basic events, or word definitions where the hyperlink is the word being defined. Links to sources where the title is not supplied in advance or whose content is otherwise not spelled out will be supplied next to the link in parentheses (excluding Wikipedia, save when directly quoting from the site). One, this will be especially common with YouTube essayists I cite to credit them for their work (though sometimes I will supply just the author’s name; or their name, the title of the essay and its creation year). Two, concerning YouTube links and the odds of videos being taken down, these are ultimately provided for supplementary purposes and do not actually need to be viewed to understand my basic arguments; I generally summarize their own content into a single sentence, but recommend you give any of the videos themselves a watch if you’re curious about the creators’ unique styles and perspectives about a given topic.

Concerning (the PDF) Exhibit Image Quality: This book contains over 1,000 different images, which—combined with the fact that Microsoft Word appears to compress images twice (first, in-document images and second, when converting to PDFs) along with the additional hassle that is WordPress’ limitations on accepting uploaded PDFs (which requires me to compress the PDF again—has resulted in sub-par image quality for the exhibit images themselves. To compensate, all of the hyperlinks link to the original sources where the source images can be found. Sometimes, it links to the individual images, other times to the entire collage, and I try to offer current working links; however, the ephemeral, aliased nature of sex work means that branded images do not always stay online, so some links (especially those to Twitter/X accounts) won’t always lead to a source if the original post is removed.

Concerning Aliases: Sex workers survive through the use of online aliases and the discussion of their trauma requires a degree of anonymity to protect victims from their actual/potential abusers. This book also contains trauma/sexual anecdotes from my own life; it discusses my friends, including sex workers and the alter egos/secret identities they adopt to survive “in the wild.” Keeping with that, all of the names in this book are code names (except for mine, my late Uncle Dave’s and his ex-wife Erica’s—who are only mentioned briefly by their first names). Models/artists desiring a further degree of anonymity (having since quit the business, for example) have been given a codename other than their former branded identity sans hyperlinks (e.g., Jericho).

Extended, Book-Wide Trigger Warning: This entire book thoroughly discusses xenophobia, harmful xenophilia (necrophilia, pedophilia, zoophilia, etc), homophobia, transphobia, enbyphobia, sexism, racism, race-/LGBTQ-related hate crimes/murder and domestic abuse; child abuse, spousal abuse, animal abuse, misogyny and sexual abuse towards all of these groups; power abuse, rape (date, marital, prison, etc), discrimination, war crimes, genocide, religious/secular indoctrination and persecution, conversion therapy, manmade ecological disasters, and fascism.