Persephone's (Gothic) Insights
The horror blog about metal, videogames, and sex.

Raising Awareness: Regarding Bad Empanada and His Fascist Behaviors (and Marxist-Leninism versus anarcho-Communism)

This post appeals to any who wish to help raise awareness about Bad Empanada and his abusive behaviors, online; i.e., his reactionary fascist behavior kettling trans sex workers (and other minorities) like a sad little freak, despite him claiming to be an activist who cares about helping minorities by preventing genocide: punching down at me—a trans-woman PhD, an-Com, activist, sex worker (and voice for sex workers), anti-Zionist (re: "Justice for Palestine" or "Judas Priest: Invincible Shield and Zionism," 2023 and 2024), outspoken critic of token trans people (e.g., Natalie Wynn and Abigail Thorn), and rape survivor—but also attacking my friends in different intersecting minority communities, fighting for our rights alongside the Palestinian struggle (and all areas/peoples targeted by genocide, foreign and domestic; e.g., Sudan and Turtle Island/refugees and Indigenous Peoples, disabled folk, the homeless, POC folk, GNC and neurodivergent people, etc). Click here to listen to my live reading of this post: "Essay No.9: Two-faced Sell-Out; or, Bad Empanada—From Anti-Zionist to TERF/SWERF Incel" (2025) for the visually impaired.

Post-only note (on censorship, PDF versions and document reading level): Regarding censorship, the website version is fully uncensored; the blog version, here, is censored with an extended disclaimer explaining why (re: "Initial Disclaimers"). Also, for ease of access, I've uploaded several PDF versions (v1.71)—one that is semi-censored and another that is fully-censored, depending on reader needs. While PDFs have bookmarks for quick-and-easy reading, they are otherwise completely identical to this post; i.e., except for the fully-censored version, which doesn't include most of the censored nudity found here (and, again, is the version I read on YouTube for the visually impaired—above). However, while most of the versions are censored to some degree (excluding the 18+ version, of course), the subject matter is still intense. Keeping that in mind, I'm advertising this post's reading level at 16+* regardless of the level of censorship employed.

*Or younger with a supervising adult (see: "The Miller Test and How it Applies, Here").

Dossier Summary

If you wish to contact me, see my contact info (at the bottom of the page). The rest of the post spells everything out

  • Changelog
  • Concerning State Vampirism
  • "Concerning Fig Leaves"; or, Regarding My Educational, Fig-Leaf-Style Use of Censored Nudity and Its Excoriation by Bad Actors Calling Us "Degenerate"
  • Initial Disclaimers (for basic content and sex education/censored nudity within)
  • The Miller Test and How It Applies, Here
  • Table of Contents (dossier and addendums)

and shows proof of Bad Empanada's bigotries (as well as some censored nudity from the sex work that my friends and I do, deeper in): "a "Puritanical Ozzie expat who uses Nazi rhetoric to enrich himself while punching down at minorities; e.g., disabled people, plural folk, furries, trans people, etc";

(source skeet, vanderWaardart: October 15th, 2025)

i.e., a Zionist Quisling trying to have his cake and eat it, too—a white savior/class traitor unironically conflating trans anti-Zionism and its "identity narcissism" to Zionism/the Israeli state, but also comparing trans people and the Indigenous Peoples of Turtle Island to American apologists defending Nazi mercenary Graham Platner (to whitewash their own asses/the American establishment and electoral politics, below): an "American left" reduced to a giant monolith (on YouTube, no less) that Bad Empanada can grift off, versus not punch down at plenty of activists (an-Com or otherwise, native or not) who not only hate Israel and genocide, but also Platner and those who defend him! Bad Empanada is a giant hypocrite:

(source: Bad Empanada's "Murder Apologists: The American Left Exposes Itself," 2025)

Also, Bad Empanada's a white savior/white Indian who acts like he's the only academic on the planet, therefore the only activist who can fight climate change; i.e., despite me citing Patel and Moore (and their understanding of capital/the state's Cartesian orderings/cheapening of nature and care work) in my material, Bay being an Indigenous Person/ecologist, among others being educated to similar degrees besides us (and our metamours); e.g., Krispy Tofuuu, Delilah Gallo, even Lindsay Wheeler being allies (on purpose or by accident) to the cause. To it, Bad Empanada's a massive twat, but worse, a lone wolf without the necessary social connections to humble himself in a vital Socialist way. In other words (and to reiterate), he's a fascist and fascists are cunts—including duplicitous cunts from East Australia (as Bay guesses regarding Bad Empanada being a white liberal type from the East Coast: a "know-it-all white city boy"):

(source: Fandom)

"Judge me by my enemies," Bad Empanada says. Alright, dude; I'm an anti-Zionist fighting genocide and climate change, as are my friends and all that we stand for. So, you're a Nazi waging a false rebellion, vis-à-vis Parenti's Blackshirts and Reds (1997); i.e., a bad actor using hate speech to levy false accusations* against my friends and I, DARVO-and-obscurantism† (which we'll get to): you're the threat, here!

*E.g., rape. Rape can mean different things, Bad Empanada largely using it, when making his false accusations, to speak on sexual harassment/assault. As I use it, rape means (from my definition) "to disempower someone or somewhere—a person, culture, or place—in order to harm them, generally through fetishizing and alienizing acts or circumstances/socio-material conditions that target the mind, body and/or spirit) […] Rape can be of the mind, spirit, body and/or culture—the land or things tied to it during genocide, etc; it can be individual and/or on a mass scale" (source: "Psychosexual Martyrdom," 2024). It can be camped during ludo-Gothic BDSM as I coined it (re: "Concerning Rape Play," 2025);

ludo-gothic BDSM (rape play)

My 2023 combining of an older academic term, "ludic-Gothic" (Gothic videogames), with sex-positive BDSM theatrics as a potent means of camp—specifically rape play by placing "rape" in quotes, mid-Gothic (where rape [and playing with it] is ubiquitous). The emphasis is less about "how can videogames be Gothic" and more how the playfulness in videogames is commonly used to allow players to camp canon in and out of videogames as a form of negotiated power exchange established in playful, game-like forms (theatre and rules). Commonly gleaned through Metroidvania as I envision it, but frankly performed with any kind of Gothic poetics, ludo-Gothic BDSM playfully attains what I call "the palliative Numinous," or the Gothic quest for self-destructive power as something to camp (the Numinous, per Rudolph Otto, being a divine force or numen tied less to the natural world [the Sublime] and more to civilization as derelict, dead and alien; re: the mysterium tremendum): a Communist Numinous/the Medusa per Barbara Creed, but not tokenized (re: the Amazon) while dancing with Hogle's ghost of the counterfeit to reverse abjection (thus profit) and shrink the state!

For further information on ludo-Gothic BDSM and its rape play elements, refer to my new webpage cataloging the subject and its history/extended definition(s), everything coined and synthesized by me. —Perse

i.e., "rape" placed in quotes, mid-Gothic—much of which concerns rape and alien, imposturous things to play "rape" out with, during calculated risk—to ironically undermine canonical norms/reduce means of actual harm, on a systemic level: that, when meaningfully unaddressed by widespread unawareness and unintelligence, further systemic abuse during unequal arrangements of power and status (which unironic rape predominantly is). Gothic Communism, as my friends and I conceived it (over seventy of us; e.g., Blxxd Bunny and I, below), dialectically-materially combats rape as a consequence of capital and nation-states; i.e., as a historical-material outcome, doing so "through a widespread, collective and solidarized emotional and Gothic intelligence/awareness, one that recultivates the Superstructure and reclaims the Base through intersectional resistance and de facto (extracurricular) reeducation" (see: series abstract, "My Larger Body of Work").

(model and artist: Blxxd Bunny and Persephone van der Waard; re: "My Logo for Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism!" 2023)

†Deny Accuser Reverse Victim/Offender—an abuser's tactic that, alongside obscurantism (the theft of symbols and language; e.g., the crooked cross), fascists love to abuse while infiltrating Communist circles; re: Bad Empanada is fascist while calling himself "leftist." Fascists are incels and incels are reactionary (with Eliot Rodger and similar goons calling for the complete-and-utter control of women, gender and sex... which Bad Empanada is also doing in bad faith).

To that, "Raising Awareness" began as an e-mail to individual content creators on YouTube, but I figured I may as well share its dossier* on my old blog and 18+ website (a more secure means of archiving information than Google Docs). I've also updated and expanded on this post repeatedly from its e-mail form—adding substantial portions from my own Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communist corpus, my friends and I critiquing the Marxist-Leninist approach, specifically its sexist, queerphobic and otherwise exclusionary/reactionary elements that Bad Empanada currently contributes to; i.e., by punching down at me, but also my friends (e.g., my partner Bay Ryan, below). Despite these various renovations, this post retains some of its original epistolary* elements!

(artist, left: Bay Ryan; right: Persephone van der Waard)

*Despite the academic elements and desire to teach contained herein, this post isn't really an "essay" like Bad Empanada posits (with a great deal of sarcasm and deflection, below); it's more a PSA that includes academic elements I added over time—to teach my audience mid-PSA, symposium-style! Even then, he still felt threatened[4] enough—by my gay fluffy ass rightfully calling him out publicly for his bullshit—to publicly address it, himself, in bad-faith: "What is a [wo]man? A miserable pile of secrets! But enough talk! Have at you!" / "Now go away or I will taunt you a second time!"

(model and photographer: Bay's cat, Bay Ryan)

Changelog

Technically this document is complete. However, I still like to make updates, every so often; i.e., with spelling and grammar corrections, small quality-of-life stuff (for organization purposes), and further evidence whenever it's supplied/occurs to me. While old versions are automatically removed from my website, all the changes are listed here for historical purposes by date/document version:

[redacted for brevity; full changelog contained within either PDF version]

Current version, 2/7/2026 (v1.71): Added a footnote on Trotsky at the start of "Stalin and Company Haunting Marxist-Leninism into Present Discourse"; updated the About the Author section, but also general disclaimer to account for keywords; and added "Concerning State Vampirism" after the changelog to explain the place that "Raising Awareness" occupies: in a larger body of research (re: "Anarcho-Communism vs Marxist-Leninism (re: State Vampirism)," 2026).

(artist: ChuckART)

Concerning State Vampirism

(artist: Karen B.; cited: "The World Is a Vampire," 2024)

This piece (essay or otherwise) is part of a larger series on state vampirism. As I conceive it, state vampirism = feeding through the state mid-abjection*, be it openly capitalist or Marxist-Leninist. These are largely questions of aesthetic, whose Promethean (self-destructive) function extends to other configurations "of Omelas"; e.g., Zionism. Furthermore, there's overlap between my anti-Zionist work and my work critiquing Marxist-Leninism/state vampirism alongside capital, so consider reading both.

*Which state predation and revolutionary action both rely upon to function; i.e., "on the Aegis" as something to further or reverse, mid-vampirism, through paid/unpaid labor (re: me, vis-à-vis Julia Kristeva). To that, abjection (us versus them/alienation and fetishization) is one of four main Gothic theories my book series utilizes—the other three being hauntology (retro-future), cryptonymy (show/hide) and chronotopes (time-space) alongside smaller theories; e.g., Jerrold Hogle's ghost of the counterfeit† and Barbara Creed's monstrous-feminine (Gorgons and Amazonomachia, as I study it). As a queer sex worker and academic, I dialectically-materially prioritize abjection and vampirism through unpaid labor—chiefly sex work as exploited by Cartesian dualism and its harmful, maximalist binaries under Capitalist Realism, treating nature as monstrous-feminine (re: "Nature Is Food," 2024)—but mention the other theories, too (access "Four Main Gothic Theories (the Four Gs)" in "Paratextual Documents" for their longer definitions). In essence, capital/the state rape by design, which unpaid labor prevents by breaking Capitalist Realism mid-abjection; i.e., reversing abjection during ludo-Gothic BDSM (rape play) when having the whore's revenge (which "State Vampirism" explores at length): "to break the profit [and productivity] motive by making a world for which it (and rape) are no longer possible using these methods; i.e., by using the same demonic and slutty language capital does, but at cross purposes" (source: "Rape Reprise," 2024).

†Re: "Raising Awareness" (2025),  footnote 1.

"Concerning Fig Leaves"; or, Regarding My Educational, Fig-Leaf-Style Use of Censored Nudity and Its Excoriation by Bad Actors Calling Us "Degenerate"

In recent months, Bad Empanada and company have repeatedly labeled me and my friends' work as "degenerate," a fascist dogwhistle with historically TERF/SWERF applications (dating back to Weimar and the Nazis); i.e., punching down at me for being a trans sex worker/sex educator—specifically attacking me for "showing nudes," which they unethically conflate with, and wrongly accuse me and mine of, different untrue things: sexual assault, being a sex pest, not respecting consent, stalking, etc; re: "degeneracy." Such things are false flags, used DARVO-style by Bad Empanada et al to devalue me and my friends' research and activism, overall; i.e., when combatting fascism the likes of which Bad Empanada contributes to when punching down.

To it, this page features fig-leaf-style nudity for purposes of sex education with artistic and censored pornographic elements; i.e., operating under the Miller Test/protected speech under American law (source: Justice.gov). All censored material is used elsewhere in my book series; i.e., as part of said series, and with permission from the models therein (re: my book series disclaimer). All models are over 18 and were when said material was produced.

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

To expound, "Raising Awareness" features "fig leaves" (specifically baby metroids, above); i.e., entirely covering the genitals* of any nude examples (a style of censorship dating back centuries, exhibit -1). Said nudity comprises primarily of sex work/sexual activity my friends and I exhibit for educational purposes; i.e., tied to anti-fascist activism and preventing genocide/rape (see: "Initial Disclaimers," deeper in). Also (and to be perfectly clear), I already had multiple disclaimers about said nudity and its usage—both directly below ("Post-only note") and deeper inside (re: "Initial Disclaimers")—but have chosen to add another + a short exhibit that doubly stress me and my friends' use (and style) of censored nudity: a form of public nudism existing entirely within a curated gallery online (one clearly stated as educational and artistic, preceded by multiple disclaimers and announcements; e.g., this blog's actual title: "the horror blog about metal, videogames and sex"). I'll also have Josey add a censored nudity warning to this page and others like it on this blog—not because I feel they're 18+ but to further warn people who don't read the disclaimers I actually put in the posts!

*Specifically sex organs (of any gender) and female nipples. However, while the anus, penis and balls are covered up—as are female external genitals (the vulva, clitoris and labia majora/minor)—some pubic hair remains visible outside the fig leaf; i.e., around the larger pubic mound, navel and inner thighs: what might otherwise be visible concerning someone both "aggressively unshaven," downstairs, and wearing too-small briefs at the beach (e.g., a thong or boy shorts, etc). Further exceptions occur for artistic nudes [e.g., the Coppertone Girl, 1959—below] and also the buttocks; i.e., regarding either "plumber's crack" (semi-visible crevice), and/or excessive amounts of "cheek" being shown: when underwear is worn but still noticeably on the "skimpier" side!

(source: Miami Memories' "The Coppertone Girl looks for a new home," 2008)

Also, despite our educational usage of censored nudity in this post, Bad Empanada and his followers are currently slandering my friends and I; i.e., in the legal sense, which the below exhibit shall briefly explain from an ethical standpoint[5]:

(exhibit -1: Artist: Lysippos. Michael McClellan, in "Professor Butter Beard and 'It's All About the Fig (Leaf),'" cites Alexxa Gotthardt: "Consider the fig leaf: a little piece of foliage that's shielded the genitals of famous biblical figures and nude sculptures for centuries. It's a plant that's become synonymous with sin, sex, and censorship. And in large part, we have art history—and the artists determined to portray nudity even when it was considered taboo—to thank for that" [source]. McClellan, themselves, goes on to add, "The Italian Renaissance brought about the revival of classical Greek statuary and with it, nudity. Donatello's small bronze statue of David from around 1440 is still considered by art historians to boldly be the first nude statue since antiquity. Yet it was another David, by Michelangelo, that would cause a cultural gasp due to its larger-than-life nudity" [ibid.].

It bears repeating how the Catholics would strongly protest said nudity, as well as the Nazis [and those who emulate them when calling for genocide through state censorship and crackdowns; re: Bad Empanada wrongfully accusing me of stalking and sexual harassment, below; see, also: footnotes 4 and 5]. Nazis historically cry "degeneracy" and "corruption" when abjecting sex workers, therefore educators; i.e., by wrongfully framing them as "sex pests" through paramilitary force; i.e., cops and other state actors functioning as de facto pimps versus sex workers; e.g., the whores of Weimar [re: "Joy Under Fascism," 2025] but also my own critics [token or not] accusing me and mine repeatedly of "not respecting consent." This precisely describes what Bad Empanada and company are doing against me; re: falsely accusing me of criminal activity—notably stalking and sexual harassment, below—despite knowing their claims are false, thus slander to a criminal degree [re: footnote 5 and the legal side of slander as it concerns myself and Bad Empanada]: while punching down at a trans-woman activist, academic, survivor of rape, and sex educator legally combatting fascism [re: under protected speech, including on Bluesky].

[source skeet, Bad Empanada: October 28th, 2025]

This isn't the first time I've been wrongly accused. I've been stalked and harassed by individual parties [re: "Addressing a Stalker Defaming Me," 2025], and publicly attacked by bad actors in my own community [re: "Setting the Record Straight, Transmisia Experience: 5/26/2023"] and elsewhere; I'm also a rape victim who has spoken about my own abuse many times [re: "I'm a Rape Survivor," deeper in]. This is, however, the first time I've been publicly slandered by someone during an open hate campaign; i.e., defamed by Bad Empanada, a public figure, for having called his political beliefs and practices "fascist" under protected speech [which opinions and political beliefs are, in America]: by him targeting me through hate speech, specifically his wrongfully painting me of criminal activities I am not guilty of; re: of being a "dangerous sex pest capable of sexually assaulting others" and a "stalker" [above and below].

[source YouTube comments, left: The Kavernacle's "My Response to this Leftist YouTuber," 2025; right: Persephone van der Waard's "Essay 9.25: Apologizing for Misapplied Research/Asking for The Kavernacle's Help with Bad Empanada," 2025. Source, bottom-left-middle: Wikipedia and Brooklyn Museum; top-right-middle: Antonio Canova]

As such, Bad Empanada is an abuser currently accusing me in bad faith; re: as a fascist pimp-in-disguise, ringleading others in a shared hate campaign. Said campaign isn't just harming me but my partners, all of whom have suffered emotional stress because of Bad Empanada's actions; i.e., my partners being disabled/rape survivors, themselves, thus more susceptible to the very stress Bad Empanada is trying to inflict: getting to me through my partners. Punching down at my friends and I for blowing the whistle against fascism, he and his friends' aren't just slandering us through libel; they're enacting a transphobic, whorephobic, and deeply unethical hate campaign, one whose hate speech specifically targets sex educators/revolutionaries who also do sex work, mid-activism [e.g., Delilah Gallo; re: "Hailing Hellions: An Interview with Delilah Gallo," 2025].

Comparable to the Nazis policing Weimar [which occurred in stages, not overnight], it's essentially a call for the burning of books and those who write them; i.e., pimp/whore-style, under a Protestant ethic "gone to pot" [re: on par with the total, indiscriminate destruction of the German Institute of Sexology in 1933, above]. To that, Bad Empanada is calling not just for my silence, but that of my friends, incel-style; i.e., by asking our books to be burned, DARVO-and-obscurantism; e.g., Picasso: "You kill the woman [and works tied to her] and you wipe out the past she represents." From the Gorgon to us, Bad Empanada is repeating today what the Nazis did nearly a century ago! Kindly spread the word.)

Initial Disclaimers (for basic content and sex education/censored nudity within)

Disclaimer Regarding Essay Contents: All opinions are my own; i.e., as part of my research, conducted alongside my non-profit sex-ed book series, Gothic Communism (2023). Said series continues after its June 2025 finale in small-form content like this post; e.g., essays on and interviews with other sex workers. The material within is written/speaks about public figures and popular media for purposes of education, satire, transformation and critique, hence falls under Fair Use regarding copyright and free speech regarding defamation/obscenity laws (the Miller Test; source: Justice.gov). It pointedly covers Bad Empanada's YouTube channels, but also the medical industry and police state, etc, and is pointedly part of the larger work I do beyond my book series; e.g., my "Hailing Hellions" Q&A (2025), where I interview sex workers of all different kinds, and my anti-fascism research concerning popular media more broadly. Click here for the entire disclaimer this work belongs to (a portion of said disclaimer being included, in this post; re: regarding the Miller Test). Lastly many of the links on this page lead to my age-gated 18+ website where my entire work on Gothic Communism is stored and exhibited (though you can find a SFW version of the same promo page and series abstract on this blog).

CW: racism, genocide, fascism, Zionism, classism (aporophobia), sexism, ableism, hatred towards neurodivergence (e.g., plural people), rape/rape apologia, toxic masculinity (incels), xenophobia (towards Indigenous Peoples), transphobia, whorephobia; re: censored nudity

Concerning Keywords: My arguments rely on various keywords I've previously coined, which here present in bold while color-coded (usually only once, while stressing their keyword status; e.g., ludo-Gothic BDSM, Metroidvania, or the palliative Numinous, etc). While some are given here, in abridged form, "Paratextual Documents" provides all neologisms, in full.

Regarding the Educational Nature of This Page's Censored Nudity: This page is designed for sex education (and satire, transformation and critique—namely sexual violence and anything that contributes to it on a societal level; e.g., Bad Empanada's bad praxis). It contains censored images of nudity/sexual activity (with some visible pubic hair, below); i.e., tied to me and my friends' sex work, education and activism elsewhere; it is not pornographic in function (therefore not legally obscene), but serves to educate, satirize, transform and critique fascism under the Miller Test using censored nudity. To that, while this page's reading level specifically targets adults for reasons of academic complexity, I ultimately feel the censored images it contains remain suitable for teenage audiences—meaning under 18 already learning about sex elsewhere; i.e., you'll find similar scenes of uncensored sexuality in sex-ed books meant for children 10+; e.g., It's Perfectly Normal (1994) by Robie Harris and Michael Emberley. Last but not least, "Any publicly available images are exhibited for purposes of education, transformation and critique, thus fall under Fair Use [and free speech]; private nude material and collabs with models are specifically shared with permission from the original owner(s)" (source: Gothic Communism disclaimer, 2023). All models involved are over 18 and were over 18 when said material was made. 

(artists: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard)

Is there some legal grey area, involved? I would imagine there is. However, trans people, women and other marginalities are already relegated to such "purgatories"; i.e., the de facto brothels of the state; e.g., the kitchens, bathrooms and washrooms, but also prisons and gutters—sexuality removed from public life and shoved into the bedroom exclusively per nuclear models (re: Foucault's A History of Sexuality, Volume 1, 1980). They're already oppressing us* and looking for future excuses to further abjection† (therefore genocide): against labor's monstrous-feminine† side (Cartesian thought's "thinking beings" versus "extended beings"; re: Patel and Moore). So I'd rather speak out while I can—meaning messily using what my friends and I got, versus playing by the state's pimp-like rules to such a narrow, myopic, color-within-the-lines degree to get pogromed, anyways (meaning "accident of birth," born into Agamben's state of exception, mid-crisis)! The closet is death, the street (and taking to it) often our only mode of recourse: the proverbial "dead" walking the Earth, doing so while the Imperial Boomerang sails home (re: "Police States, Foreign Atrocities and the Imperial Boomerang," 2024)!

*E.g., removing our healthcare on a state level through federal threats of force; see: Eli Newman's "Out of reach: Where do Michigan’s trans youth go for care now?" (above, 2025).

(artist: Martian Zombie)

†Re: Kristeva and Creed—abjection meaning "to throw off," in Gothic theory. Generally this happens into a state of abnormality (the out-group)—all to reinforce "normal" (the in-group) as the status quo acting dogmatically "superior" to arbitrarily alien things; e.g., said status quo pimping nature as monstrous-feminine/alien, meaning the Gorgon and things comparable to/of it; i.e., nature as alien, criminal, or otherwise "other" tied to workers, often sex workers: the Medusa and its proxies common recipients of the abjection process being furthered; re: the state enforcing its own status quo for profit under capital, thus raping "nature" as placeholder for labor (whether human or not) and the environment scapegoated for state abuse (see: "Always a Victim" [2025] for a deeper exploration of this concept, as well as my entire research on Amazons/Gorgons, aka Amazonomachia or "monster battle"). Doing so happens through pro-state dogma being historically fueled by racism, queerphobia, sexism and other bigotries—any and all conducive to such ethnocentric operations (extermination), ranging from the Enlightenment aka "modernity" into late-stage Capitalism. From Antiquity to that point, the oldest profession to abuse is the whore, but some degree of racism—particularly the barbarian outsider to abject by insider elements tied to house and home—is roughly as old (versus systemic racism tied to capital, which is far newer).

The Miller Test and How It Applies, Here

This post is a continuation of my Sex Positivity book series, and follows the same rules; re: the Miller Test; i.e., as a work of sex education meant to protect myself and others from waning worker rights and stricter obscenity laws, Project 2025 onwards. To protect myself and my work, I've chosen to cite more of the series disclaimer, here; re (from my 18+ website's "Disclaimer" page):

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 [censored], 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). [...]

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.

(artist: Michael Emberley)

*While this book was written for adults—[its uncensored images] provided to them through my age-gated website—I don't think it should be denied from curious teenagers through a supervising adult [and think the censored versions on my blog are suitable for teenager audiences already learning about sex elsewhere]. 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 (e.g., It's Perfectly Normal from 1994 meant for ages 10+, above). 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. 

**Per FSC v. Paxton, the Miller Test is currently under attack (source: June 27th SCOTUS ruling)—with the Trump administration enforcing misappropriation of the law to abuse sex workers in bad faith; i.e., all under the guise to "protect women and children," simultaneously violating peoples' privacy and healthcare rights (Persephone van der Waard's "Prohibition and Genocide Are Here," 2025).

To it, porn and sex education/art are not mutually exclusive, and anyone who clutches their pearls about sex education as badly as Bad Empanada does has more in common with the Puritan shills and fascist pimps of history than those they oppress; i.e., more in common with Adolf Hitler, Margaret Thatcher or Stalin—ergo Marxist-Leninism and the state apparatus pimping workers—than with Alexandra Kollontai (who Stalin betrayed) or myself, currently a target of Project 2025 trying to make trans people illegal by attacking porn; re: Michigan's Puritanical House Bill 4938 aka "the anticorruption of public morals act." Widespread censorship always begins with porn bans—"porn," in this case, being the same sorts of people outlawed and ultimately destroyed by capital (we queers the "frogs" of fascist overtures, more sensitive to fascism for being what fascism/the nuclear model aka "Rome" hates). By treating us as "inherently pornographic," such rhetoric on their part is maximalist and, if enacted, will only succeed in furthering genocide against all workers! By targeting my friends and I to puritanically censor and shame, Bad Empanada is placating fascism by taking part in fascism; i.e., he supports genocide, as does anyone willfully endorsing or otherwise enabling his genocidal* arguments, ergo red/false flags, DARVO and obscurantism.

*Making obvious "broken clock" exceptions for his admittedly fine postcolonial essays; e.g., on Manifest Destiny, Jewish Exceptionalism through Zionism, Christopher Columbus, and Operation Carwash—all of which he currently uses to whitewash the transphobic and whorephobic content on his second channel and on his social media accounts. Alas, reductionism is reductionism, Bad Empanada's reactionary and maximalist antics pointedly reducing revolutionary struggle. By doing so, he deliberately excludes the same groups various dictators throughout history have; re: Indigenous Peoples and queer folk, the disabled/neurodivergent, POC, and so on—and all while coming from Australia, himself! He's not oppressed, then; he's a white straight man of the first world, hypocritically appealing to fascist values and calling it "activism"; re: by treating slurs and genocide as such, versus what they actually are: petty opportunism and revenge, a Rasputin grifter transplant serving bourgeois interests (as fascism always does, meaning through false rebellion; re: Parenti's Blackshirts and Reds)! DARVO and obscurantism—it's real ringleader shit, the ethnocentric stuff of chicken hawks dating back centuries (with sodomy fears actually millennia old, by Western standards; re: Foucault).

Table of Contents

Note: I've expanded on "Raising Awareness" greatly since the original October 20th e-mail (above). The addendums are bold and color-coded. —Perse

P.S. (12/8/2025), Having finished the bulk of this document (which has practically become a small book), I've reorganized its modules; i.e., to be more accessible/categorical: "Frontload," "The Dossier," and "On Sex Work versus Marxist-Leninism."

Frontload

  • On Tokenism (side bar)
  • Bad Empanada Is a Bad Actor (re: a TERF and a SWERF)

The Dossier

  • Original E-mail Opening
  • About Me (and My Friends' Sex Work/Activism, in Particular—plus addendums)
  • Raising Awareness (about Bad Empanada's Abusive Behaviors)
  • My Total Evidence
  • Assorted Evidence Submitted by Others
  • My Larger Body of Work
  • I'm a Rape Survivor
  • About my PhD

Poetry Exercise: "Wide-Load: Concerning Cryptonymy and Reversing Abjection, 'on the Aegis'; or, a Quick Refresher on Embodying the Gorgon's Fat, Terrifying Ass"

On Sex Work versus Marxist-Leninism

  • Regarding Nudity (Censored or Not) as Educational, Not Criminal (during intersectional struggle)
    • On Nudity, Cocottes and Red Scare (and Critiquing Soviet Aesthetics during Socialist Realism, feat. Lady Izdihar)
  • Concerning Marxist-Leninism (versus Gothic [gay-anarcho] Communism; feat. Socialism for All and Chemical Mind)
    • "Suffer the Little Children": Marxist-Leninist Transphobia among Token Gen-Zers and Alphas (side bar)
  • Notes on Lenin, Stalin, and Why Marxist-Leninism Historically Sucks for Women and Queer People (with Bad Empanada being functionally Marxist-Leninist)
    • Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism vs Marxist-Leninism
    • Stalin and Company Haunting Marxist-Leninism into Present Discourse; or, Their Toxic Legacies Polluting Present Praxis
    • Further Critiques on Marxist-Leninism (from Other Researchers)
    • State Kayfabe and Vampirism: Emulating Marxist-Leninism's Dictators, from Stalin to Mao
      • Stalin's Kayfabe: the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact
      • Mao's Vampirism: Bad Empanada's Favorite Dictator?
    • In Closing: Such Men Suck, and How to Take Our Power Back from Them "on the Aegis"

Frontload

Before we start, I'll give you several things to keep in mind; i.e., that revolve primarily around sex worker struggles versus whorephobic traitors like Bad Empanada: framing us (and other minorities) as "degenerate" to enact fascism/defend capital in the process.

  • "On Tokenism (side bar)": Transphobia, whorephobia, and other bigotries aren't merely extant to Bad Empanada and Marxist-Leninism; they expand tokenistically to other socio-political modularities (and their material outcomes). "On Tokenism" explains my specializing in tokenism, and how I invite readers to think about Bad Empanada's "fascism in disguise" more broadly; i.e., regarding tokenism and its own historical-material tendency to conceal/reveal itself (the cryptonymy process): to disguise fascism/exclusionary behaviors behind the coded language of inclusion and rebellion (e.g., TERFs), therefore yield up selective bigotries and maximalist attitudes when examined.
  • "Bad Empanada Is a Bad Actor (re: a TERF and a SWERF)": Stresses Bad Empanada's TERF/SWERF-style approach to fascism-in-disguise.

On Tokenism (side bar)

(artists: Persephone van der Waard and Cuwu)

Whores police whores as much as not, slaves historically punching down at fellow slaves to cannibalize when tempted by state pay. Betrayal is betrayal, assimilation poor stewardship. So, while I've worked with plenty of rebellious whores (such as Cuwu, above)—and our focus here is Marxism and Marxist-Leninism (which tend to be functionally white, straight and male per capital/state models; re: me vis-à-vis Patel and Moore)—tokenism is a separate topic worth thinking about, as we do; i.e., through intersecting betrayals tied to the same status quo Bad Empanada (a white straight man) serves; e.g., Greene's Man Box or Plato's allegory of the cave (re: "The World Is a Vampire") being something he, a weird canonical nerd

weird canonical nerds (versus weird iconoclastic nerds—abridged)

A term I coined while borrowing from and expanding on Cheyenne Lin's "weird nerds" phrase from "Why Nerds Joined the Alt-Right" (2023), and one I present through my usual dialectical-material approach despite the obvious social components I'm weaving into things: weird canonical nerds vs weird iconoclastic nerds, or otherwise proponents of canon vs camp in popular culture; i.e., anything that weird canonical nerds posit, their iconoclastic brethren challenge in duality.

To it, weird canonical nerds work within a toxic subset of nerd culture. Whereas nerd culture more broadly is for those who present an increased intellectual interest in a given topic—often in literature, but also popular media more broadly as something to consume, critique, or create (with iconoclastic varieties extending such matters into a spectrum of modular activism and counterculture)—weird canonical nerds are those who undermine genuine, active intellectualism; i.e., by exchanging it for dumb, hostile and even bad-faith consumerism and negative freedom for the elite (source: "Paratextual (Gothic) Documents").

(source: "The Chickens Come Home to Roost: Transphobe Bad Empanada Goes Mask-Off," 2025)

enacts as much as token billionaires like J.K. Rowling or token trans people like Natalie Wynn or Abigail Thorn (above), but also POC/Indigenous People do with Black or Red Skin, White Masks (1952, 2014); re: (as I write in "Investigative Journalism (on Tokenism)" from "Is Metal Racist?" 2025):

While my specialty is tokenism (re: "Regarding Tokenism and Fighting It," 2025) and I historically began my investigative work emphasizing TERFs and SWERFs, I've combatted a variety of modular bigotries that often intersect; e.g., racism—exploring it not just among

    • white moderate men like Solomon Nelson refusing to investigate race science in bodybuilding ("White Moderates Don't/Still Don't Challenge Fascism," 2025)
    • and Karl Jobst in videogames ("Hot Karl," 2025)

but also people defending them who aren't white who are bigoted in a variety of ways (e.g., "Intraracial Bigotry from a Token Pimp! feat. ‪@GenXGamerYouTube‬ and ‪@PotionSwordRun" and ‬"Token Asian GNC Lawyer Defends Alt-Right Billionaire, feat. ‪@lus‬," 2025). I've also examined racism/race betrayal (tokenism tied to race) in my book series multiple times; e.g., Afrocentrism and token queer black Nazis in 2023's Castlevania: Nocturne (re: "Back to Necropolis"), token Amazons (re: "Toxic Schlock Syndrome"), and Indigenous betrayals/white Indians ("The Roots of Trauma, part one: Assembling Trauma and Questions of Betrayal in Beloved, Frankenstein, The Last of the Mohicans, and The Terror: Infamy (feat., Toni Morrison and Howard Zinn),"2024). For minorities, activism and existence go hand-in-hand.

Food for thought, and something to keep in mind as we investigate Bad Empanada as a bad actor more broadly. What he does, other workers more oppressed can do, too; i.e., regardless of privilege/oppression ratios and media types involved: castrating labor with the same-old means (often Gothic poetics; i.e., the Gorgon, below, representing the oldest struggle under Western models translating to myriad forms of oppression raping nature and those "of it": the pimp and the whore).

Bad Empanada Is a Bad Actor Attacking Minorities (re: a TERF and a SWERF)

Academia is not cut-and-dry. Speaking as someone who values Bad Empanada's postcolonial work, I've certainly given him plenty of time and leeway to prove he isn't transphobic. Given time, though, he's only leaned into his TERF and SWERF tendencies; i.e., while acting innocent/more anti-Zionist than he actually is—an impostor, in Gothic language, and one who punches down against minority anti-Zionists like my friends and I (re: "Justice for Palestine"):

(source skeet, Bad Empanada: October 2nd, 2025)

As we proceed, then, please keep in mind that Bad Empanada is a bad actor attacking minorities, but especially GNC people, sex workers, and neurodivergent folk. Yes, Bad Empanada might call himself this or that to hide from this fact (at least on his main YouTube channel, serving as a front for his alt-right turn)—and he'll certainly call me and my friends plenty of things while telling you not to read our work; e.g., "sex pest," "creep," "useless eater*," etc (with Marxist-Leninism happy to advocate for dictators while historically punching down at women, sex workers and queer folk).

*A classic attempt at alienation and demonization; i.e., "not a worker" from a classist, ableist straight white man versus recognizing the shared struggle of fellow workers with more oppression than him: my partners are still workers despite their oppression (three images down). Bay is disabled†, for example, but also an ecologist who does sex work alongside other forms of physical/academic labor. And Victoria is a former sex worker (re: "Hailing Hellions: An Interview with Victoria Saix," 2025) who works in other ways/has a full-time job, pays a mortgage and owns a home (though even if they didn't, sex work is still work and homeless/unemployed people are workers with basic universal human rights; i.e., as all marginalities are; re: as workers to defend from the state and cops/stochastic terrorism calling us "terrorists" per the terrorist/counterterrorist binary). By reducing us to "non-workers," cops (traitors, class or otherwise) scapegoat us to meet their cop function—a classic fascist tactic towards women and queer people; i.e., one historically employed by the Americans, British, Russians/Soviets, Chinese ("hooliganism") and Germans, etc, before, during and after WWII. 

†In Māori culture, people are not defined by their labor in pre-colonial models. This includes disabled people, Dr. Huhana Hickey explains:

I want us to try and find a way to teach Māori the pre-colonial beliefs around disability. Because the post-colonial beliefs have led us, where some whānau [family, or a group of people connected through such ties] believe we hold a makutu (curse) or a hara (fault), which is that we are a deficit, that we are a curse, we're a sin. / We're none of those things. Prior to colonisation, we were a taonga [treasured possessions, both tangible and intangible, that hold deep cultural and spiritual significance] (source: Facebook).

To define someone purely by their labor value—specifically their ability to contribute to society and the national body (the leader/dictator and heads of state)—is, again, fascist and ultimately regressive; i.e., in ways of capital the Soviets historically upheld (and the Russian Federation continues to, emulating Imperialism [thus the West] more and more).

(re: source skeet, Bad Empanada: October 28th, 2025)

In my case, Bad Empanada calls me "rapist" in so many words (above); i.e., despite my being a rape victim (re: "Going Mask Off: Showing Jadis' Face," 2025), as well as being someone who consciously and collectively advocates for sex worker/minority rights, and sex education to prevent rape in my community and around the world; re: those Bad Empanada calls "useless eaters" through the same colonial, bad-faith logic when wrongly accusing me of rape:

(artists, left to right: Bay Ryan, Victoria Saix and Crow)

For example, my partner Bay Ryan is Māori, disabled, furry and trans; my partner Victoria Saix is intersex and into BDSM and crossdress; and my partner Crow is non-binary and into pet play but mostly puppy play—all survivors of abuse who participate in a shared goal (to prevent rape), and the very sorts of people that Bad Empanada called "useless eaters" when I rose to their defense (source skeet, Bad Empanada: October 2nd, 2025). In truth, he's kind of an incel, fascist and Zionist; i.e., punching down mid-DARVO* at trans, anti-Zionist and anti-fascist sex workers like myself (and other minorities, below) to relegate/partition, intimidate and ultimately rape: "and where they ban books they will ultimately burn people."

Silence is genocide*; censorship precedes and accompanies genocidal action, prohibition disguised as a protection of "public decency and morals" prior to empire invading itself. It happened in Germany in the 1930s, but also America—a nation that's experienced myriad moral panics designed to preserve capital (and the bourgeoisie) at the cost of all workers. It only starts with minorities and marginalized workers, the elite having the in-group cannibalize the usual victims before throwing the executioners into the same ignominious furnace.

*My slogan, one modifying the Brooklyn Museum's "SILENCE=DEATH" (1987) exhibit—itself borrowing the Nazi's pink triangle (a death warrant given to Holocaust-era gay people) to make a larger point about American genocide: of queer folk (especially homosexual men) during the AIDS crisis (see: "Understanding Vampires" for a broader history of queer abuse on either side of the Atlantic)!

That's what fascists do; e.g., not just the famous book burnings of the German Institute of Sexology in 1933 (above) but It's Perfectly Normal as one of the most feverishly banned books of the '90s ("Supporters Rally Around It's Perfectly Normal," 2023)—with current anti-trans legislation seeking to literally ban trans people online "for being pornographic" (Michigan's Puritanical House Bill 4938). As part of Project 2025, their doing so is occurring alongside a deluge of gay panic defense and hate crimes salivating over the possibility of accelerating trans genocide everywhere; i.e., Bad Empanada's a TERF and a SWERF and if you scratch a SWERF, a fascist (ergo rape apologist) bleeds: someone who sees the Miller Test as an obstacle to genocide, therefore the killing of trans people as allies to the Palestinians that Bad Empanada claims to care about!

(source skeet, Bad Empanada [and my reply]: October 27th, 2025)

The Dossier

Here's my entire dossier on Bad Empanada; i.e., organized primarily in the order it was written, top-to-bottom:

Note: Portions in bold and color-coded do not appear in the original e-mail; I added them while writing "Raising Awareness," after said e-mail was sent. Apart from those, "The Dossier" unfolds in the order I composed the original e-mail. —Perse, 12/8/2025

  • Original E-mail Opening
  • About Me (and My Friends' Sex Work/Activism, in Particular—plus addendums)
  • Raising Awareness (about Bad Empanada's Abusive Behaviors)
  • My Total Evidence
  • Assorted Evidence Submitted by Others
  • My Larger Body of Work
  • I'm a Rape Survivor
  • About my PhD's Independent Nature

Original E-mail Opening

To Whom It May Concern,

My name's Persephone van der Waard and I'm reaching out to ask for your help. In short, I have a smaller YouTube channel tied to my research, off-site (on my 18+ website and old SFW blog). I'm specifically trying to bring wider public attention regarding someone who is calling for political violence against my friends and I: Bad Empanada. Bad Empanada—despite enjoying some degree of reasonable doubt for being "on the Left"—is calling for political violence against trans people, but also Indigenous, neurodivergent, furry and plural people (with me being trans, and my friends being GNC + those other qualities). Here's where Bad Empanada's abuse is actually happening, on Bluesky.

Note: In more recent coverage of him, I noticed Bad Empanada's rhetoric sounds very similar to the 10/14/2025 Politico exposé on (relatively) young American GOP leaders (see: "React No.28: Bad Empanada Calls for Political Violence Against Critic Calling Him Fascist," included in postscript evidence package). —Perse

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

Please note, I'm a sex worker, so my Bluesky account is 18+. However, I also have SFW coverage, which I'll share, as well (and, again, some censored nudity [e.g., above]—just to drive home the point that my friends and I do sex work tied to our activism).

About Me (and My Friends' Sex Work/Activism, in Particular—plus addendums)

My work ties to that of my friends' work. About me (quoted from my published materials; i.e., my website's "About the Author" page):

I have my MA in Gothic English literature and independent PhD in Gothic poetics and ludo-Gothic BDSM (focusing partially on Metroidvania), and I am 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). I'm a MtF trans woman, Tolkien and Amazon enthusiast, anti-fascist, atheist and Satanist, poly/pan kinkster, erotic artist/pornographer and anarcho-Communist.

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

In short, I'm a trans an-Com activist, academic and sex worker, but also author of multiple books (eight); i.e., on Gothic Communism as I coined it, for my book series (see: postscript for more info). My book series is made in conjunction/collaboration with over seventy sex workers. So when someone fascist like Bad Empanada tells my audience, "Seriously, DO NOT CLICK. These people are deeply unwell and can't help themselves but to permanently sexually harass everyone around them [emphasis, me]" (source), remember a few basic things:

  • What I say about him is true regardless if I have clothes on or not, how much money I make, sex I have (more than him), grass I touch, work I do, or gender I identify as; re: that he's "a TERF and a SWERF employing DARVO" to project his weird reactionary tendencies onto me (above): "TERFs are SWERFs and if you scratch a SWERF, a fascist bleeds. Like, I'm a sex worker, my dude, and the image isn't nude; it's censored (classically they'd use a fig leaf, not a Metroid, but my point still stands). That's not 'harassment,' you Puritanical weirdo, so quit with the DARVO, already" (source); i.e., I didn't tag him, he came to my page and accused me of "harassing him." Real incel behavior (specifically reactive abuse).
  • He'll still be fascist, because that's what his actions indicate; e.g., punching down, ipso facto, against an anti-Zionist like me makes him a Zionist, ergo fascist (crying about a fig leaf the way some philistines cry about marble sculptures).
  • That I'm currently under attack politically by my own government, not just Bad Empanada (a hypocrite who relies on his fans to do his fighting for him): "a trans woman faced with imminent harassment following the election of Trump and implementation of Project 2025—e.g., the FSC v. Paxton June 27th SCOTUS ruling (regarding media censorship [not just of porn in Texas, but anything "obscene"] and the elimination of the Miller Test) [as well as] Michigan's Puritanical House Bill 4938 [aka "the anticorruption of public morals act"] (and the treatment of trans people as inherently pornographic/obscene* in ways that bypass the Miller Test)" (source: "My Site Security," 2025).

*Which Bad Empanada is doing with my friends and I; re: acting the pimp by blaming the whore (or those he treats like whores).

(source skeet, vanderWaardart [to boltzmann1844's reply]: October 28th, 2025; citing: "Returning to Volume One, Two Years Later (give or take) after Five Books; or, Cuwu's Hand in Forming Ludo-Gothic BDSM," 2025)

  • Re: "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 owner(s)" (source: Gothic Communism disclaimer); this includes my ex, Cuwu—a sex worker, Communist and trans person like I am, but who also gave me permission to use the material we made together to make money with (and which I opted, instead, to use in a non-profit book, above).
  • That trans people are people and sex work is work, even if Bad Empanada (and his weird hateful friends) don't think so/think we're "inherently pornographic" and "degenerate," thus worthy of political violence (whose Puritanical nature delegitimizes sex-work-as-activism to keep workers sexually ignorant/under state control). Whores aren't stupid, but human and capable/deserving of standing up for ourselves; i.e., by fighting fire with fire versus pimp-like workers who—Soviet, Chinese, Britain, Russian or American—historically betray labor in Puritanical ways: treating us as alien, like Frankenstein's monster as something to keep in chains, thus perpetually unironic rape and torture. Exploitation and liberation share the same stages, and bleed off those stages into daily life (when camping the canon).

(artist: Mercedes the Muse)

  • That work and play (aka business and pleasure) are not mutually exclusive; i.e., porn/art through sex work remain valid forms of protest/revolutionary action, regardless of what he and other more prudish MLs arbitrate (austerity politics from hypocrites Puritanically punching down for the state and capital*). Per ludo-Gothic BDSM, these forms includes BDSM, rape play and fetish work tied to Gothic poetics (monsters including Creed's gorgon; re: the monstrous-feminine but also Amazons, as I research them); e.g., mommy dommes and horror junkies like Mercedes the Muse (who also reads academic material while combining it with sex education/sex work, above):

*Who try and monopolize violence, terror and monsters† (re: Weber, Asprey and me) for profit per Cartesian, heteronormative (nuclear) and settler-colonial models† furthering abjection through canonical Gothic's invention of terrorism (re: Crawford). Such models and monopolies are not all-powerful, workers able to reclaim the power of such things "on the Aegis":

†See all these concepts outlined in "The State: Its Key Tools" from "Paratextual (Gothic) Documents."

(Exhibit 1: Artist: Mercedes the Muse, top and bottom; top: exhibit 67 [from "Toxic Schlock Syndrome," 2025]: "Model, top-left: Mercedes the Muse; artist, right: Persephone van der Waard. Mercedes specifically asked to be drawn getting fucked by Toxie": those relegated to the gutter reclaiming our humanity through dehumanizing language historically abused by state powers.)

  • They also include sex tapes made by couples for the cause; i.e., whose work is an extension of their humanity and—in Marxist language—their labor value reclaimed through negotiated labor exchanges planned between workers (and their instruments of instruction and exchange) across space and time:

(Exhibit 2: Artists, left [top-to-bottom]: Tyler & Husband and Kay of Sunshine [cited: "It Began with a Whisper"]; right: Mugiwara [cited: "Toxic Schlock Syndrome" ]. Mugi is a parent, plural and housing challenged; Tyler is trans and disabled; and Kay of Sunshine is autistic and a rope bunny. All models were commissioned to specifically appear in my book series; i.e., for sex-educational purposes [satire, transformation and critique] tied to BDSM, Gothic themes, an-Com theory, ludology and gender studies.)

Ultimately, Marxist-Leninism is historically-materially toxic towards sex workers, women, queer people and the environment (more on this in a bit). To that, Bad Empanada isn't just calling for political violence against me and my friends (the sort enacted not just by Americans, but by Hitler* and Stalin against queer people and various other minorities, too); he's also impeaching my character as I call him out for it, and that is what I'll be raising awareness towards when giving my evidence, here—e.g., belittling me for being poor (above) but also accusing me of "sexual harassment" and "assault"; re: despite my being a rape victim and someone who actively advocates for sex worker/minority rights, and sex education to prevent rape in my community/around the world. That's literally the point of my book series (and to break Capitalist Realism, but I digress).

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

*The Nazis historically shuttered the brothels of the Weimar Republic, their own American-inspired prohibition cracking down maximally on anything "degenerate" they saw as an affront to "public morals"; i.e., in light of state economic failure scapegoating labor, including sex workers (re: me vis-à-vis Jill Suzanne Smith's Berlin Coquette [2013] in "Joy Under Fascism"). Bad Empanada is fascist, specifically an accelerationist leaning into these "blame the whore" historical trends; re: a TERF and a SWERF pushing Trump to enact violence on poor trans people and other minorities treated like trans people (e.g., Michigan's aforementioned "anticorruption of public morals act" designed to make trans people illegal in Michigan, setting a dangerous precedent for the whole nation and its allies/victims alike). I guess the Nazis really do flee to Argentina!

To that, Bad Empanada maliciously describes the work that my friends and I do as conspiratorial, but also done by one "madwoman in the attic"; re: a "series of blogposts that no one reads" (with alienation and isolation being a common bully's tactic, divide-and-conquer as old as empire and city-states). In truth, "my work" is actually our work; re: Gothic Communism a larger project conducted by me others; i.e., illustrating mutual consent based on informed labor exchanges ("Paratextual Documents"), representing a wide variety of people that Bad Empanada considers "useless eaters": worthy sacrifices despite being workers he'd sentence to forced labor for the state.

(source skeet, Bad Empanada: October 8th, 2025)

We need allies, not pimps! Silence is genocide, and Bad Empanada is calling for our silence like a pimp (which the Puritans and Protestant ethic historically are/serve as); i.e., not just mine, but anyone I protect from people like him; e.g., hurling around rape accusations against a survivor of rape like myself. To him, we're not human—our lived abuse something for him to attack and scapegoat, belittling us as "degenerate," "decadent," "alien," "criminal," "diseased*," what-have-you. It takes a special brand of asshole to punch down at rape victims/victims of genocide, but that's what Bad Empanada's doing (furthering the abjection process; re: Creed and Kristeva, which I want to reverse, mid-cryptonymy, "when in Rome").

*E.g., the "sick men of Asia" insult from Bruce Lee's Chinese Connection/Fist of Fury (1972).

Raising Awareness (about Bad Empanada's Abusive Behaviors)

Returning to the matter at hand, I'm currently reaching out regarding Bad Empanada; i.e., someone who has been "crashing out," in recent months (see: "The Chickens Come Home to Roost: Transphobe Bad Empanada Goes Mask-Off"); re: his fascist tendencies towards minorities (see: above essay, as well as "Slurs Aren't Activism," 2025—with more citations in my postscript). In short, I've been documenting this evidence for some time (since February 2024) and slowly releasing it on my website and in my books, but also on my blog and YouTube channel (where I'm less active).

In light of this mounting evidence (and Bad Empanada's flagrant bigotry and grifter hypocrisy), I'm trying to raise awareness regarding his recent actions, but also those supporting him; e.g., Bad Empanada, again, calling for slave labor against his critics and labeling minorities "useless eaters" (see: evidence, below) while The Deprogrammed (and its leads: Second Thought, Hakim and Yugopnik) continue to endorse Bad Empanada, anyways; i.e., in "The Fire Will Cease (Ft. Bad Empanada) - Episode 166" (above) by keeping said episode up and plugging his stuff, but saying nothing about his recent crash-outs:

As a small channel and trans sex worker to boot, I'm not sure what else to do but appeal to larger creators to see if anyone (GNC or otherwise) will comment on the story. Bad Empanada is a SWERF, but so are these men for shamelessly supporting him. They're turning a blind eye to fascism in their own backyard, which makes me question their own beliefs, when push comes to shove.

Hope to hear from you, and thank you for your time,

—Perse

My Total Evidence

P.S., Here's my total evidence on Bad Empanada, both written and video, as well as my larger body of work said coverage ties to:

My written work on Bad Empanada:

(exhibit 0: Top: an e-mail I wrote to Bad Empanada after his arrogant and heartless devaluing of Aaron Bushnell ["Americans Demand I Praise US Soldier Who Self-Immolated to Protest Gaza Genocide," 2024]—with me urging solidarity from Bad Empanada with an anarchist martyr and their decision to protest how they did; bottom-left: the same message shared on his February 29th community post; bottom-right: source tweet, scott_crow: sharing "Memories of Aaron Bushnell," February 29th, 2024. Bad Empanada never responded. "We should not live in a world that requires human sacrifice to make an important political statement on the value of human life," my partner, Bay Ryan, would reply.

February 2024 was a rough month. "Capitalism has no use for people who see each other as human;" I wrote of Nex Benedict, "it wants us dehumanizing ourselves so capital can function as normal, moving money through nature at the cost of human life. Capitalism needs us to die, so we need to remember and honor Nex' humanity" [source: "An Ode to a Martyr," 2024]. A day later, I would also write of Aaron: "Aaron Bushnell believed in something greater than himself and died to uphold it by making his name synonymous with self-sacrifice: ending the Palestinian genocide by martyring himself within the Imperial Core. He died a hero for that cause and should be remembered as one, not dismissed for it" [source: "Bushnell's Requiem"]. Now, as things come full circle, we see just how lacking Bad Empanada's own humanity is.)

My YouTube videos on Bad Empanada:

(source)

Some additional sources (re: from my latest, "React No.28: Bad Empanada Calls for Political Violence Against Critic Calling Him Fascist," but also from my above [18+] Bluesky account post):

Originally from a [2024] community post Bad Empanada made, saying "People who talk about sex constantly and openly like it's their main interest must be dealt with. Make it taboo again," followed by him responding to me, saying "BDSM doctors aren't real" when I called myself one (which, I am); i.e., [according to him,] I—a BDSM doctor and trans woman—am not real (thus neither are sex therapists and paid/unpaid researchers, apparently)" (source: "Understanding Vampires: 'What Is (Problematic) Love?'; or, Positions of Relative Ignorance to Relative Clarity (feat. Bad Empanada and Marxist-Leninism," 2024).

Assorted Evidence Submitted by Others

Some evidence on Bad Empanada has been shared with me by others of their own accord. Not all of it is dated/sourced, so consider it alleged if those sources and/or dates aren't included.

  • Here, Bad Empanada conflates being GNC with pinkwashing/Zionism:

(source skeet, SpartanJoe193: November 2nd, 2025; originally posted: September 15th, 2025)

  • Here, Bad Empanada allegedly laughs at a rape victim:

  • Here, an Indigenous Cree speaks out against him:

(source: "Essay No.7: Transphobe Bad Empanada Goes Mask-Off")

  • Here, someone describes his swollen ego in ways that verge on cultishly arrogant/self-centered:

(source: "Essay No.9: Two-faced Sell-Out")

  • Here, Bad Empanada runs defense for Nazis:

(source skeet, Maztr_0n: November 25th, 2025)

  • Here, testimony from lenini056 on Bad Empanada's ableism, specifically sanism:

(source: "Essay No.9: Two-faced Sell-Out")

  • Here, Bad Empanada flaunts his wealth:

(citing source skeet, ‪okadaizo: December 7th, 2025)

  • Here, Bad Empanada apologizes for Gamergate using different dogwhistles (e.g., "degenerate"):

(citing source skeet, ‪okadaizo: December 7th, 2025)

  • Here, someone explains how apologizers enable Bad Empanada's fascist behavior:

(source skeet, ‪Umbire: December 6th, 2025)

My Larger Body of Work

Regarding my larger body of work, there's frankly a lot, and I'm mostly including it to be holistic. So I'll try and summarize things here in a page; i.e. in four paragraphs, plus the abstract (my work is holistic and broad, but also extensive and multi-volumed over years). In doing so, I'll likewise provide a variety of links; re: which—unless stated otherwise—lead to my 18+ website where my entire work on Gothic Communism is stored and exhibited (though, again, you can find a SFW version of the same promo page and series abstract on this blog)!

First, my name is Persephone van der Waard; I'm a multi-book, non-profit author, activist, sex worker and pornographic historian/invigilator who specializes in sex positivity/universal liberation through Gothic poetics. My book series is called Sex Positivity versus Sex Coercion, or Gothic Communism: Liberating Sex Work under Capitalism through Iconoclastic Art (2023). Gothic Communism, as I define it, is "the deliberate, pointed critique of capital/Capitalism using a unique marriage of Gothic/queer/game theory and Marxist ideas synthesized by sex-positive workers during proletarian praxis. Meant to end neoliberal/fascist Capitalism in order to bring about anarcho-Communism, this liberation occurs through sex-positive labor (and monsters) reclaimed by sex workers" (source: "About the Author," 2023).

Second, my project illustrates mutual consent as a matter of dialectical-material context; i.e., through informed and shared labor exchange achieved by working with other sex workers and artists, everyone serving a larger mode of expression and development that carries into the future out of the past and present. I spearhead and fund the work, but it's ultimately a group project. Here's the abstract (from my 18+ website's one-page promo, where you can also learn about/access the individual volumes/modules, project history and logo design):

My book, Sex Positivity versus Sex Coercion, or Gothic Communism: Liberating Sex Work under Capitalism through Iconoclastic Art, examines the various differences between sex positivity and sex coercion in sexualized media. Its "Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism*" combines a wide variety of theories in order to critique capital and capital's sexualization of all workers: anarcho-Communism, Marxism and fourth wave intersectional feminism with the sharpness of Gothic academic theory, the immediacy of online political discourse, as well as postcolonial, posthuman and queer theory, ludology, sex education, antifascist (thus antiwar/anticapitalist) sentiment, poetry and a variety of ironic, xenophilic sex worker illustrations and negotiated labor exchanges' creative successes that illustrate mutual consent in Gothic BDSM language; i.e., what I call "ludo-Gothic BDSM" using various poetic devices to establish—among other things—rape play and the palliative Numinous during calculated risk to raise emotional/Gothic intelligence and class, culture and race awareness; e.g., Metroidvania and the monstrous-feminine having the whore's revenge against profit pimping nature (re: "Rape Reprise"). As such, Sex Positivity employs these theories (and their respective language/mode of expression) holistically and intersectionally to dialectically-materially examine and combat unironic xenophobic mental enslavement during the Internet Age: sex positivity (and universal liberation from profit and the state) versus sex coercion (and universal enslavement pursuant to profit).

*Re: "the deliberate, pointed critique of capital/Capitalism and the state using a unique marriage of Gothic/queer/game theory and semi-Marxist (an-Com) ideas synthesized by sex-positive workers during proletarian praxis: developing systemic catharsis, mid-liminal expression, with ludo-Gothic BDSM." Refer to "Paratextual Documents" for the full definition, as well as all of the core Gothic theories I use.

Specifically Sex Positivity tackles how neoliberal state-corporate proponents—i.e., official or stochastic cops, including TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical [fascist] feminists) and other standard-to-tokenized (crypto)fascists use canonical imagery created from coerced sex work to affect imagination as a socio-material process; i.e, using canon to generate complicated linguo-material arrangements that

      • continuously exploit sexualized workers through widespread xenophobia under late-stage Capitalism; i.e., Capitalism sexualizes all workers to heteronormatively serve the profit motive, commonly through harmful Gothic poetics and BDSM theatrics.
      • canonically exploit said arrangements to enshrine their abuse in abject, cryptonymic-hauntological crypts/chronotopes that "incarcerate," "lobotomize," "infantilize" and "incriminate" the public imagination; i.e., Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism, or myopic inability to imagine a world beyond Capitalism even when Capitalism is in decay (whose maxim regarding Capitalist Realism reads: "It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of Capitalism"; source: Capitalist Realism, 2009).
      • simultaneously pimp and condemn sex-positive artists who seek to liberate sexualized workers through their own iconoclastic, ironically xenophilic praxis; i.e., camping the canon to escape its brutal historical materialism through their own creative successes, achieving praxial catharsis regarding systemic abuse and generational trauma.

Sex Positivity illustrates, similar to how oscillation is a key component of the Gothic, that Gothic Communism is the oscillation between Capitalism and anarcho-Communism as dialectical-material forces felt in Gothic language by real people: oppositional praxis, or the practical application/synthesis of theory in dialectical-material opposition. To combat nation-states as the ultimate foe, Gothic Communism's chief aim is to be campier (thus sexier and funnier) than Marx; i.e., camping his ghost to develop a holistically intuitive anarcho-Communism begot through a widespread, collective and solidarized emotional and Gothic intelligence/awareness that recultivates the Superstructure and reclaims the Base through intersectional resistance and de facto (extracurricular) reeducation.

Simply put, Gothic has that mood, that cool factor to do the trick; i.e., by subverting monstrous language, which normally dehumanizes workers and nature through popular stories furthering abjection (us versus them): to suitably humanize the harvest, which capital (and its Realism) can only pimp out when vengefully raping nature as monstrous-feminine whore. The whore's revenge against profit, then, is to fuck back on the same Aegis; i.e., when the Man comes around, show him your Aegis. When done correctly, its paradoxical, cryptonymic exposure will set you free (re: silence is genocide), but reversing abjection must happen together as one—per intersectional solidarity healing from rape through a shared pedagogy of the oppressed: walking away from Omelas and towards post-scarcity while becoming better stewards of nature than historically have ever existed (assimilation is poor stewardship)! Medusa demonstrates there is power in what they try to control; take it back by using it in ways they can't steal from you! Become the Gorgon!

(artist: Nyx)

The collective, holistic idea is to break Capitalist Realism vis-à-vis the historical-material reality that capital not only alienates everything but sexualizes/fetishizes it, too. The latter idea is actually the subject of my PhD, which concerns various ways to challenge Capitalist Realism during ludo-Gothic BDSM. "Ludo-Gothic BDSM" combines of Gothic theory and poetry with ludology (the study of play) and BDSM power exchange ideas, mid-praxis: "My [2023] combining of an older academic term, 'ludic-Gothic' (Gothic videogames), with sex-positive BDSM theatrics as a potent means of [socio-political] camp" (source: "About the Author," 2024).

To it, my work builds off Marx, camping his theories and limitations by expanding them beyond his frankly older, more narrow treatment of class reductionism that still exists today (see, SFW blogpost: "Making Marx Gay"); i.e., a holistic and all-inclusive and GNC methodology that includes raising emotional/Gothic intelligence as well as class, culture and race awareness to change socio-material conditions: to reclaim the Base and recultivate the Superstructure (with a praxial emphasis on the latter during workers' daily efforts to cultivate and develop such things). We do so to a (re)cultivate a countercultural understanding of the "Gothic" imaginary past—one we seek to challenge capital with by having our (whore's) revenge against profit; i.e., by challenging profit (and capital's Cartesian, settler-colonial and heteronormative elements pimping nature) through liminal, half-real (on and offstage) poetic extensions of ourselves we pass onto future generations.

Like I said, my corpus is quite broad; re: six books in my book series (which concluded, in June; re: "It Began with a Whisper"). However, I also have two other books, besides; i.e., that also cover sexuality and fascism in media (when developing Gothic Communism):

On top of those, I also have a body of work after Sex Positivity and its June 2025 finale: in small-form content; e.g., essays on and interviews with other sex workers; i.e., those muses and models I've worked with beyond those on my Acknowledgments page (whose featured models worked with me while I produced Sex Positivity). To see everyone I've drawn before, during and after said series, refer to my Sex Work page.

I'm a Rape Survivor

Abusers—TERFs or otherwise, MLs or otherwise—often take pleasure in not just hurling new abuse at someone, but getting them to talk about past abuse so the attacker can deny it; i.e., blaming the victim, the whore, the thinking queer (women, but also trans, intersex or non-binary people) for the system's abuses. But this ain't my first rodeo: I, Persephone van der Waard, am a survivor of rape. While so are many of my friends (re: "An Interview with Victoria Saix"), here, I'll be focusing on me.  To it, let's talk about my rape (and rapist); i.e., while also remembering Bad Empanada and my evidence against him wrongly accusing me of rape/other related abuses commonly levied against trans people (especially trans women, aka "men in women's spaces") by fascists (re: stalking, sexual assault/not respecting consent and being a sex pest/degenerate, etc)!

I was raped by my ex in Florida, from mid-2020 to January 2022:

This brings us, once more, to Jadis [real name, Lindsay Wheeler]—a person not without means (at least according to my admittedly limited intelligence, at this point), thus someone I unmask here, Scooby-Doo-style, with some degree of risk (especially since Donald Trump is now president. Whatever hells they visit upon me, should they try to, this step towards my own Hell is one that decolonizes their awful notions of such things; i.e., they were the first TERF/SWERF I encountered, in person, and the primary motivating factor for writing Sex Positivity as a series (which started with the intent to discuss TERFs and not only why they suck, but how they as witch cops look like witches policing their own kind, next page): Jadis was a traitor who raped me (source: "Going Mask-Off: Showing Jadis' Face," 2025).

[artist: Jadis; source: Persephone van der Waard's "Why I Submit: A Subby Gothicist's Attitudes on Metroidvania, Mommy Doms, and Sexual Persecution," 2021]

I would go on to detail these proceedings at length in multiple pieces of writing (ibid.):

To that, these exhibits are screencaps from previously recorded videos produced between us with their full knowledge and consent; i.e., the videos were recorded with their full permission, explicitly for me to keep for my personal enjoyment*: Jadis enjoyed knowing I had them, effectively making them homemade porn between two willing (and eager) participants. The screencaps used are before sexual activity takes place, with Jadis either having all of their clothes still on, or the nude portions of their body off camera; i.e., my showing of these recorded conversations is to prove that they occurred, not to demonstrate their total pornographic contents, which I refrain from showing in these exhibits (exceptions being towards myself as nude, solo, to demonstrate the erotic qualities of courtship that took place between us: what Jadis and I exchanged, prior to us moving in together).

[model and photographer: Jadis and Persephone van der Waard]

*Jadis abused me repeatedly in ways I have explained in the past (re: "Escaping Jadis," July 6th, 2024) and shall explain again, here. The context for these screencaps is to give vital background to what I am explaining, and to show my abuser more than I have previously done in earlier accounts. In short, I'm putting a face to the alias—my right as a victim outing that portion of my abuser as I see fit. My past accounts of abuse regarding them have been up since at least early 2023 (e.g., "You really do have a beautiful body"; source: "Sex Positivity versus Sex Coercion, or Gothic Communism: Manifesto," modified from July 2022 to 11/4/2023) but expanding in 2024 to include censored images of Jadis' body but not their face, and more detailed accounts of their abuse (source: "Transforming Our Zombie Selves," June 27th, 2024).

Furthermore, the older samples cite even older media that has been online since before 2022 and includes uncensored images of Jadis' face and real name (e.g., "Why I Submit," February 19th, 2021), recordings of Jadis identifying themselves and their profession for the mic (e.g., "Dreadful Discourse, ep 1: What is the Gothic?" June 26th, 2020; timestamp: 0:35), me with my arm around them after they graduated from UF (source tweet, NicksMovInsight: May 6th, 2021). The point being, Jadis has known about my identifying writings of them since before we broke up (many of which they offered feedback on) being cited in my writings about them after we broke up calling them my abuser and then later still, my rapist. The rape claim has been active for over six months, and my claims of abuse for roughly two years. Not once has Jadis ever contacted me after February 14th, 2022, either to harass me or ask me to cease and desist.

To which, I reasoned back then and now, they know about the claims and ability for their name to be connected to the alias, but haven't done anything about it; i.e., that it wouldn't be especially difficult for anyone reading these publicly available accusations to follow the references back to their original, publicly available sources, thus to acquire: Jadis' full name, where they went to school, what they look like, and ultimately what they did to me. This also includes publicly available Google Docs that detail their abuse not just cursorily but in vivid and extensive detail; re:  "Setting the Record Straight Again; Accounting My Ex's Abuse of Me to Another Victim_August 30th, 2022" and "Setting the Record Straight; My Ex's Abuse of Me: February 17th, 2022."

Said documents have been up, live and unaltered, since their posting dates. Jadis has not once reached out to me to acknowledge them, but apart from blocking their Twitter main, I have made no effort to hide my work from them, either. I've even written about their abuse of me and other people and featured images of all of us together (e.g., Tim, with Jadis and I; exhibit 39a2b, "Escaping Jadis") and Jadis still hasn't done anything. I can only reason they either know they're guilty and/or don't care (and to my knowledge are still living with the other abused person; re: their former ex, "Tim," who knows everything about Jadis [because I told them] and were with them longer than I was—over ten years, versus roughly two).

Despite this, I have since been accused of rape before when talking about my own abuse; i.e., when talking about unrelated things, only to have it brought up by future abusers; re (from "Replying to Jon Barbas: a Follow-Up to My 'Is Metal Racist?' Video," 2025):

Moderates, for example, rank rape to uphold capital through rape apologia; e.g., Richard Dawkins saying he cares about women when, in truth, he only cares about policing the bodies and language of victims (women or not); i.e., Melissa McEwan's 2013 article about him was eventually taken down:

For many survivors of sexual abuse, lasting trauma is defined not by the actual acts, not by their quality or quantity, but by the support they receive following the abuse. Dawkins notes that, as soon as he got away from his abuser, "I ran to tell my friends, many of whom had had the same experience with him." He may not recognize that as a crucial point in his not suffering lasting harm, but the fact that he immediately found support among peers who validated his experience, who neither shamed him nor called him a liar, and the fact that, years later, they would still speak to one another about the abuse after the abuser died, is an invaluable resource to a survivor, which many of us do not have. / To the contrary, many survivors of sexual abuse are silenced and neglected and shamed by the very people who are meant to support and protect us (source, Wayback: "Dawkins Defends Himself with More Rape Apologia," 2013).

The difference between someone like Dawkins and victims like us (of any kind of rape/power abuse) reading the room is just that: victimhood in service to workers and solidarity. While Dawkins was abused himself, McEwan reminds us how he uses his lived abuse to encourage further abuse systemically—to bury his feelings and punch down, in other words. He's a cunt.

To clarify (as to be crystal clear), "ranking abuse" but especially rape (of any sort) is generally done to deny its existence; e.g., I was raped, then accused of not actually being raped; i.e., by someone who was defending a cryptofascist from criticism (a form of tone-policing that bullies the victim while blaming and gaslighting them):

Gen-X Gamer [in "A Token Bigot Goes Full Mask-Off Fascist!" (May 11th, 2025)] goes full mask-off; i.e., this time saying he'll prove that I'm a "fraud," only to employ witch-hunt and conversion therapy arguments while deadnaming me and misgendering my friends and I. He also: apologizes for sexual/sex worker abuse, slut and kink shames myself and others, hates on artists/poor people/service workers, denies the validity of my arguments and relationships, calls me a coward for talking about my own rape, and attacks my professions (re: sex worker and erotic artist fundraising for sex workers and disabled people, with him literally comparing me to Andrew Tate while confessing to his own wife being a sex pest)—all while still being racist, sexist, and transphobic as he brown-noses Karl Jobst! Dude straight up is asking Karl—a broke cryptofascist who misled his own audience to fleece them (now a matter of public record; re: the judge from Billy Mitchell's lawsuit certifying Karl's defamatory actions)—to sue me for calling Karl and Gen-X racist (source: "Token Defenders of Karl" from "Hot Karl," 2025).

Beyond cis and racial minorities (and MLs, which I suppose are a political marginality—at least in the US), I've also been accused by other trans people and/or sex workers of rape/"not respecting consent"; re (ibid.):

much of my transphobic hate coming from the gaming community: FPS metal fans defending their favorite franchise from me (re: "No Girls or Trans People Allowed," 2020). Most of this came from straight white guys, mind you, but some of the hatred also comes from GNC folk punching down at me as some kind of "toy-breaking asshole"; e.g., my ex-friend Jade, a DOOM fan who met me through my 2020 Doom Eternal review (the one got all the trans hate, above) someone who—loving metal, horror movies, videogames and action figures—tried to get me to "transvestigate" my own partner... only to incite violence against both of us when I refused; i.e., from other sex workers, many of whom were cis but some who were not (re: "Setting the Record Straight, Transmisia Experience: 5/26/2023" and "Policing the Whore," 2024).

The reality of being a survivor is we are often not believed, by allies and even by other survivors of rape who "rank rape" according to varying degrees of privilege and oppression; e.g., men rank rape with cis women, but cis women rank rape with trans women, these realities intersecting with race and class, as well. Kat Blaque, for instance, is a survivor of abuse, and someone (also trans), who is all too familiar with the realities of surviving rape:

I am a survivor of sexual violence. I've openly spoken about that many times. And something that I am truly coming to embrace is that we don't really live in a society that gives victims of sexual violence justice [...] even if you have proof, even if you have evidence, the likelihood of you seeing your rapist put away is very, very slim. And even when you do, it's almost always for a very, very short amount of time (source: Kat Blaque's "Doordash Girl" and why I'm glad I never reported..."; timestamp: 16:30)

In my case, I survived my rapist only to fall into the arms of another abuser, Cuwu. Except Cuwu helped me heal from rape, as did my other partners/exes—including me learning from my abusers having harmed me mentally, physically and sexually—using whatever was on hand; e.g., heavy metal and sexuality through punk culture experienced by horny nerds; re (from "Replying to Jon Barbas"):

Nerds and whores aren't mutually exclusive; i.e., nerds fuck—often to metal, but also Emerald Web—and if you want to learn more about music, date a baddie (the YouTube algorithm will only get you so far); e.g., Cuwu and I, but really any of my exes teaching me through metal and sex: Lindsay taught me about Industrial and Tool; Zeuhl about, well, zeuhl, drone, Vaporwave and a gazillion other weird genres on RYM (where I used to write reviews); and Cuwu showed me bands and artists like Slush Puppy, Neutral Milk Hotel, Billy Ellish, FKA twigs, etc:

(exhibit: Image material from "Returning to Volume One, Two Years Later (give or take) after Five Books; or, Cuwu's Hand in Forming Ludo-Gothic BDSM" [2025]. Top-right, bottom-left and bottom-right: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard; top-left, exhibit 6b2a1: "My exes and I: Zeuhl [top] and Jadis [bottom]. I've written about both extensively in this book series, but each has their own respective exposé: 'Non-Magical Detectives' and 'Showing Jadis' Face.' As explained in those pieces, Zeuhl's face continues to be mildly censored because they're more neurotic, vindictive and marginalized than Jadis. Both harmed me greatly but through said harm inspired me; i.e., to write and illustrate Sex Positivity to heal from said harm, thus ultimately meet Cuwu [and those who came after Cuwu]. For every useful idiot, you have accidental allies!")

I also learned similar lessons from the people I dated afterwards: my partner Bay Ryan is Māori, non-binary and disabled; Crow is non-binary and into monster fucking and horror stories; and Victoria is intersex and rape survivor like I am (all above). None of us are perfect victims, nor were those who harmed us perfect abusers. Instead, we're all part of the same pedagogy of the oppressed*, approaching abuse from different vantage points (re: "Healing from Rape," 2024). This includes the music each of them showed me, but also Gothic media more broadly (e.g., Crow loves werewolves, Victoria loves Angel Dust from Haz-bin Hotel [2021] and Bay loves drag queens and kings; e.g., Eartha Kitt); i.e., the more you play in consciously intersectional and rebellious ways makes you more active in your ability to rebel: learning from sluts (even the closeted ones), meaning while capital relegates us to the bedroom for white straight men (and tokens) to enjoy!

*From Paulo Freire's 1970 book of the same name.

In Cuwu's case, they "showed me kindness after Lindsay and taught me how to heal from rape [re: "Healing from Rape"] while embracing my burgeoning queer self (my 'second puberty')" (ibid.): Cuwu would help me formulate ludo-Gothic BDSM and give me a groundwork for developing Gothic Communism (the idea and the book series) after our friendship ended (re: "Returning to Volume One, Two Years Later (give or take) after Five Books; or, Cuwu's Hand in Forming Ludo-Gothic BDSM," 2025). There is seldom a happy ending with rape survivors, but there is a silver lining once we begin to heal; re: Cuwu, a trans Marxist-Leninist, helping my Communist ass further radicalize towards anarcho-Communism of a gay and Gothic sort!

(artists: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard)

All that being said, Bad Empanada has repeatedly accused me of abusing others while simultaneously downplaying my education*/revolutionary character and impeaching my general character, too (e.g., being trans, poor and a sex worker); i.e., while he receives unmitigated support, tolerance and latitude from a variety of openly Marxist-Leninist content creators defending and endorsing him, anyways (re: Chemical Mind, but also Second Thought, Hakim and Yugopnik)—next section). Betrayal takes many forms, women and sex workers (queer or not) some of the first victims when incel types like Bad Empanada (and their defenders) get involved (re: dictator apologia being rape apologia, state's rights trumping worker rights in a particular order that favors white straight men, first and foremost).

*Someone, I should add, who is far more educated than himself (according to his own logic [and hypocrisy], no less—below); e.g., with my master's, let alone my PhD (and subsequent book series both attach to, next section). Yet Bad Empanada—a career YouTuber who makes a fair deal of slop on his second channel and, whose formal education isn't online (so, probably not higher than undergrad, in that case)—hasn't been shy when declaring my work "worthless"; i.e., calling it "mere blogs that no one reads or cares about" and which only serve to "save" other people from the danger I apparently (according to him) pose to the public (re: source skeet, Bad Empanada: October 28th, 2025)! In true Radcliffean fashion, the self-righteous in public is a monster in private—Bad Empanada diligently crafting a Trump-style armor around himself anywhere he goes, insisting his own invincibility while projecting his abusive antics onto his victims; re: DARVO and obscurantism from a weird Puritanical nerd (re: source skeet, vanderWaardart: October 15th, 2025). Bullying rape victims, whores, and GNC people is apparently the only time Bad Empanada feels smart, happy and fulfilled—hence why he can't help himself: he, like any other abuser (which fascists are by design), can't get enough! 

For Bad Empanada and his ilk, we whores are already a sideshow—the raped whore even more of a juicy opportunity to point one's finger at, witch-hunter-style, and declare "inferior" to a supreme gentleman such as himself (as if, dude). "Rape" isn't a statement of truth to acknowledge, but cop/victim status to assign by the witchfinder-in-question: "They're wicked; get them!" Such traitors are bad actors who generally wear concentric veneers; i.e., monopolizing the criticism of particular abusers despite us, the survivors of said abuse, being more than capable (e.g., me having critiqued Natalie Wynn for longer than Bad Empanada, writing "Trans TERFs, NERFs, and Queer Bosses" back in 2022 far more aggressively than Bad Empanada did; re: "Short Critique of Contra Point's 'Envy' Video," 2022). With the gift of reflection, you can look backwards, too—watching them before they went "to the Dark Side":

(source: Facebook)

Would, coulda, shoulda. To call such men cowardly would perhaps be too obvious; to make it obvious to those who otherwise might not care, we can hang the would-be executioner with his own rope—to "hoist him on his own petard," as it were. Lucky for me, Bad Empanada's colossal arrogance has furnished me with an entire arsenal of stupid, cruel moments; i.e., which I, a PhD, can turn against him "on the Aegis."

About my PhD's Independent Nature

Nerds, PhDs or otherwise, aren't always virgins, and often play with sex (and sex toys/those treated like sex toys, below); i.e., doing so as much as whatever work we're doing at any point in time, and which abusers like Bad Empanada dismiss for being "homewreckers" (the fate of the whore since ancient times). The proof is in the pudding—the paradox of the rape victim being they must, to some degree, speak out with/regarding things that are taboo; re: "make it taboo again" (source YouTube Community post, Bad Empanada: 2024); i.e., rape testimonies from educated women, to be sure, but also sex education occurring between rape victims overcoming trauma, part-in-parcel (so to speak): Cuwu classically a muse, insofar as they helped me learn/express myself in ways that led to my PhD ("touching grass" meaning "touching ass" conducive to good praxis, also below).

(exhibit 34b3b2a2c [from "My Experiences," 2024]: Model and photographer: Persephone van der Waard and Cuwu. Cuwu had to teach me to find self-acceptance and love by playing with them as a genderqueer person who could teach me to love myself amid theatrical devices that accounted for a) my alienation under capital, and b) my new sense of identity inside that liminal position: from different perspectives, lighting and gendered outfits, etc. Exploitation and liberation exist in the same place, the same shadow zone! [...] In short, I graduated from my sex doll to a doll-like cutie who took the feared side of me into themselves to show me that it wasn't dangerous; i.e., that I was human, as was my hard dick, as were things associated with it—not so scary at all, but in fact, kind of funny-looking but fun to play with during puppy play and BDSM as I liked to enact it [subbing for/topping mommy doms]! In short, we were both toy-like and playing with each other's equipment to learn something near about ourselves under capital. They steered me and listened to the cute, noisy sounds I made in bed/wiggly motions I made when I lost control; I returned the favor when playing with them. I learned to trust gifts again, learning as much as I could. That's what my relationship to Cuwu ultimately was and continues to be!)

I've explained my PhD before, so I'll merely cite that portion again, here; re ("About My PhD (and Work Based on It; re: Metroidvania and Ludo-Gothic BDSM)" from "From Master's to PhD," 2025):

My PhD is independent, which means it's not peer-reviewed. It also concerns a topic, ludo-Gothic BDSM, that—when I started researching and eventually formulized (from early 2019 to October 2023)—had zero academic coverage; i.e., regarding a knowledge gap that my PhD sought to address by studying Metroidvania, another topic wholly understudied in academia. Even so, ludo-Gothic BDSM isn't even mentioned in my PhD argument: "Capitalism sexualizes everything for the profit motive using canonical (dimorphic/Cartesian) monstrous poetics to brainwash workers and pit them against each other during Capitalist Realism" (source: "Thesis Paragraph"). The statement doesn't specify Metroidvania, but Metroidvania were the example I used to explore said argument within my PhD: to fill the knowledge gap my PhD was addressing by formulating ludo-Gothic BDSM (and the palliative Numinous vis-à-vis Amazons); re (from Volume Zero):

…my work on camping the canon through Gothic poetics would go on, across five books, to focus extensively on Metroidvania (to a lesser extent) and ludo-Gothic BDSM and the palliative Numinous (to a greater extent) [source: "Two Years Later (give or take): Returning to My Thesis Argument after Five Books].

and

Even in 2023, I would only hint at the term's application; i.e., "ludo-Gothic BDSM" only appears 36 times in my thesis volume first edition, going on to appear 40, 180, 293 and 357 in the first editions for Volumes One and Two, parts one and two, respectively (the manifesto, followed by the Poetry and Undead/Demon Modules). This means that I've not only expanded on the term's application since October 2023, but also revisited and reapplied it numerous times while quoting older sources I wrote (source: "Concerning Rape Play: a 2025 Note on My Development of Ludo-Gothic BDSM").

I've certainly received flack regarding my PhD. These barbs range from Bad Empanada—a postcolonial YouTuber who took a hard right turn, politically (re: "The Chickens Come Home to Roost" and "Bad Empanada Calls for Genocide/Calls Trans, Plural & Furry Folk 'Useless Eaters,'" 2025)—up and telling me that "BDSM doctors aren't real" in 2024

(source: "Understanding Vampires," 2024)

to having random people approach and accuse me of everything from trying to exploit "real" sex workers (arguing how "I don't do sex work," myself, or somehow work with other sex workers in bad faith), to faking my PhD and calling myself one to get "street cred." I address some of those claims here [...]  but it's not really something I want to focus on. In short, I have better things to do with my time, and don't really want to clog up my own discourse defending my corpus from bad actors.

Instead, I wanted to address very quickly as to why I made my PhD independent at all, and why I think that's valuable in today's day and age.

Simply put, I made my PhD independent because I chose to own my work; i.e., these days, universities legally fund, therefore own candidates' research, effectively owning their PhDs too: a Faustian bargain where you sign away your rights to graduate and where, once you do, the university can do whatever it wants with your work. Worse, a rise in fascism is seeing entire departments shuttered by having their funding pulled, but also from censorship laws. So I didn't want to make things harder on myself and archiving my work by having it tied to a university body that, with its feet held to the coals, might suddenly decide to throw years of research I produced in a vault! Yet, you'd be surprised by the number of people who automatically devalued what I produced because of that; and furthermore, they assumed how I must be "up to no good"; re: despite my merely wanting to own my work, thus be better able to archive it and share it with others for free.

And yet, academia isn't some magical place where everyone is morally inclined/above critique. Quite the contrary, plenty of researchers steal from each other at a systemic level; i.e., seeking fame and fortune through problematic institutions like the Nobel Institute while taking credit for other people's work. Furthermore, academia is bigoted and exclusionary as a whole—with shit rolling downhill through the usual pecking orders; e.g., PhD departments foisting "grunt work" off onto PhD candidates and PhD candidates off onto graduate students, etc.

To it, having your work peer-reviewed isn't a guarantee of quality. For example, a recent scandal by Solomon Nelson has thoroughly exposed Dr. Mike Israetel's work to have been sub-par—both in terms of the overall nuts-and-bolts (spelling and grammar) but also its contributions to a larger body of knowledge ("Mike Israetel's PhD: The Biggest Academic Sham in Fitness?" 2025). To be fair, I don't even like Solomon as a person (re: "White Moderates Don't Challenge Fascism," 2025) but he's still correct about Mike—or at the very least, his assessment was grounded, ironically enough, in the very ideas of peer review that many who abuse academic credentials celebrate for themselves (double standards and all that). The general consensus seems to be that Mike got it for "street cred," a fact he leverages every chance he gets; i.e., by calling himself a doctor because technically he is one; re: from having gotten his PhD at an accredited university. Yet, here we are, watching that not really amount to much in real time!

By comparison, I'm not technically a doctor because I don't have my PhD from a real university. Instead, I got my master's in Gothic Studies from MMU and built on it independently through my non-profit book series. To it, the work I've done is extensive, holistic and iconoclastic enough that I readily accepted being independent, early on—meaning by 2021, after COVID dashed my plans for PhD candidacy. I certainly applied for candidacy, and also wrote submissions for journals and attended conferences. But in the end, all of that seemed less important than the work itself, so that is what I chose to focus on; I didn't want to compromise said work by devoting myself to the bloodsport that is academic life.

(source: "Our Ludic Masters," 2021)

The reality is, I am educated, but also being accused of rape by Bad Empanada—a dishonest and cowardly rape apologist/anti-intellectual nerd, and someone far less educated (and sexually active) than I am (and if he says otherwise, I'll respond, "Prove it, nerd!" but also "Sex work is work, you incel!").

Poetry Exercise: "Wide-Load: Concerning Cryptonymy and Reversing Abjection, 'on the Aegis'; or, a Quick Refresher on Embodying the Gorgon's Fat, Terrifying Ass" 

(source: Monster Legacy's "The Alien Queen," 2015; cited: "Always a Victim")

Before we critique Marxist-Leninism (whose bigotries Bad Empanada contributes to, and which materially support him, in turn; re: Second Thought, Hakim and Yugopnik), let's try a poetry exercise; i.e., in the style of Gothic Communism as I conceived it. Said exercise invokes a Gothic staple (or four): the Gorgon (abjection) standing in for Plato's mobile cave/darkness visible (cryptonymy*), as well as bloodletting (vampirism) and the Promethean Quest (aka the Numinous and chasing it; e.g., the Alien Queen, above, being a special kind of whore: the Archaic Mother/poster girl for abjection, Freud and Creed onwards).

*Two of four Gothic theories that I use, the other two being hauntology and chronotopes; see: "The Four Main Gothic Theories" from "Paratextual (Gothic) Documents").

  • "Wide-Load: Concerning Cryptonymy and Reversing Abjection, 'on the Aegis'; or, a Quick Refresher on Embodying the Gorgon's Fat, Terrifying Ass": A poetic exercise concerning cryptonymy and abjection as dialectical-material arguments, ones we won't have time to unpack, deeper in.
    • On Marx, the Gothic, and Camping Them through Poetic Shorthand
    • "A Material Girl in a Material World": Embodying the Gorgon as Dialectical-Material
    • The Scratching Method
    • Fight Fire with Fire (the Promethean Quest)
    • In Conclusion

Our exercise remains notably optional, but one that should clue you into my dialectical-material approach; i.e., as I normally do, Gothic Communism holistically applying poetry to theory—the Gothic and monstrous-feminine, but especially whores of a weaponized caliber, having their "ancient" (retro-future) revenge as something to conceal/reveal simultaneously in seemingly garbage stories; e.g., as Shelley does with Frankenstein's Monster the year Marx was born: coming home to roost, a castle in the flesh (one workers embody to Numinous degrees)!

(artist: Bernie Wrightson; cited: "Making Demons," 2025)

On Marx, the Gothic, and Camping Them through Poetic Shorthand

Gothic Communism effectively uses Marx' style (who loved using monsters to make his points, including vampires), but in less exclusionary ways; i.e., Gothic Communism pushing cryptonymically towards universal liberation, therefore intersectional solidarity/consciousness; re: in Gothic maturity (with Marx' Gothic being socially immature for its anti-Semitism, sexism, and homophobia, etc).

Gothic maturity

A new term I coined, specifically the ability to say healthy things through taboo* language during ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., while pushing for intersectional solidarity and consciousness, developing Gothic Communism (thus universal liberation) through various creative successes that collectively overcome praxial inertia, division, dormancy and betrayal.

*Including the psychosexual, oft-Freudian (violent, sexist, queerphobic) language of rape and tokophobia (e.g., miscarriages, stillbirths, rape babies, menstruation, endometriosis, etc; re: footnote 5a, "Solving Riddles," 2024). Gothic gives workers the awesome power to play not just with taboos, but modular symbols and themes of guilt, shame, bias, stigma, criminality and alienation ("otherness"); i.e., the prescriptively "unspeakable" suddenly and playfully given voice through a lively ghost of the counterfeit. Bound up in/with systemic harm as a generational problem (and one obscured by Capitalist Realism), such matters subvert during rape play in iconoclastic hands; re: as a profoundly ironic, palliative-Numinous means of calculated risk bearing out dialectical-material application, during ludo-Gothic BDSM (which Gothic Communism is). So the whorish Medusa (and her chattel-animal revenge) qualify as "murderous" depending on what's being played with; e.g., Creed's "murderous womb" having cannibalistic but also vampiric fetishized qualities: a total convergent ontology whose "bio-power" [as Foucault puts] weaponizes easily to favor nature's monstrous-feminine revenge (ergo ensuing gender trouble and jouissance upending ethnocentric dogma by camping said dogma on its face; e.g., the aforementioned "vagina dentata" of female Gorgons [versus intersex or male GNC variants] a timeless weapon of class/ass war that commonly plays out inside/outside such stories; re: "War Vaginas," 2021). She's a brick house and trap to eat you alive, mise-en-abyme (the Gothic tropes of graveyard sex, hysteria alienation/the uncanny and live burial/wanton nuclear destruction married to infanticide and cannibalism, the latter dating back to "sarcophagus," meaning "flesh-eating")!

(model and artist: Blxxd Bunny and Persephone van der Waard)

We're effectively "Making Marx Gay" (2024) by employing the same Gothic devices he did, but further than he (and his followers) actually tried; i.e., to heal from state abuse, while disguising ourselves as "mere play" through cryptonymy reversing abjection:

The Western world is generally a place that testifies to its own traumas by fabricating them; i.e., as markers of sovereignty that remain historically unkind to specific groups that nevertheless survive within them as ghosts of unspeakable events linked to systemic abuse. Trauma, in turn, survives through stories corrupted by the presence of said abuse. There is a home resembling a castle, where a ghost—often of a woman—lurks inside having been met with a sorry fate. But undeath is something that can be felt through echoes of ourselves that aren't diegetically spectral; they feel spectral through an uncanny resemblance, like standing over our own graves. This becomes something to play with during ludo-Gothic BDSM (source: "Healing from Rape," 2024).

To be clear about "rape" as something to play with, it's still a weapon, but not one the state can exclusively monopolize; re: the Gorgon as a Numinous being of rape/terror weapon that, in functionally rebellious hands, can turn state atrocities backwards; i.e., by employing the Promethean Quest to reverse abjection* "on the Aegis," such cryptonymy a concealed weapon of "mere play" that nonetheless paralyzes state capacities to cause harm: through nakedly calculated risk/a palliative Numinous playing god/with gods—specifically "homewrecker" sorts that camp the canon† to such an earthshattering degree as to threaten the nuclear order (therefore Capitalist Realism). It's what the Gothic does, the Gorgon (and similar iconoclastic stand-ins, below) a cosmic-grade, phallic (slasher, vagina dentata castrator-avenger), fatale/forte, female/monstrous-feminine poster girl for abjection, mid-cryptonymy. One moment, it's all fun and games; then, the allegory kicks in: exploitation and liberation, Communist and fascism—all share the same shadow-zone kayfabe, "in small"; i.e., embodying castles as liminal sites of power/temples as sites of worship concerning vengeful power barbarically "come home." While the state raises such spectres to routinely argue for counterfeit sovereignty (re: Hogle's "ghost of the counterfeit," footnotes), workers can revive the Gorgon for revolutionary aims; i.e., in similar Miltonically "Satanic," scapegoat language that covertly sends power flowing away from state bodies (e.g., knowledge, wealth, weapons, in literal and/or poetic varieties and hyphenations: sex and force, sickness and food, power and death, etc). Medusa = power and power = an illusion to perform, thus educate with when passing this-or-that along (re: "Notes on Power," 2023).

*As I conceive it; re: "Reversing Abjection" (written 2022, published 2025).

†From Broadmoor to me, 2021 and 2023.

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

Think of it as poetic shorthand, one helping workers understand the world "at play" (the Base and the Superstructure utilized for bourgeoise or proletarian considerations);

(source: Rana Indrajit Singh's "Base and Superstructure Theory," 2013)

i.e., through performative symbols that encapsulate giant, dialectical-material forces (and disparity of power to harmful degrees, which rape denotes) through poetic abstraction (code): the Gorgon, the monstrous-feminine, embodying at a glance that antiquated "16th century ecology" of the Enlightenment/ethnocentric thought (re: Patel and Moore's A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, 2017). Said ecology remains one that all states—including Marxist-Leninist ones—use to vampirically pimp nature; i.e., as monstrous-feminine, by continuing to scapegoat those "of it," but especially marginalized populations and minorities from unpaid labor (read: care and sex work; e.g., GNC folk). In other words, the state is straight, therefore heteronormative and settler-colonial under Cartesian thought. Under Cartesian dualism, state actors categorically monopolize violence, terror and monsters for state continuation (re: Weber, Asprey and me; see: "The State: Its Key Tools" from "Paratextual (Gothic) Documents"); i.e., to further abjection, therefore pimp care and sex work, virgin/whore: as historically unpaid for the sake of productivity and/or profit, which they show and hide to varying cryptonymic degrees. Pimping nature and those "of it" as monstrous-feminine (re: "Nature Is Food," 2024), the state rapes by design using Gothic poetics, which workers can poetically reclaim through ludo-Gothic BDSM (re: as I coined it; e.g., castle-and-vampire "courtly love" arguments, below).

The Gorgon, by comparison, effectively embodies the whole process, the whore's paradoxical revenge versus the pimp's (re: "Rape Reprise," 2024); i.e., whose oppositional, dialectical-material praxis remains one of cryptonymy and abjection in duality (workers vs the state). A vice character whose paradoxically mendacious dumper stores the truth of the world—and upending the nuclear model before, during and after Freud (obscuring Marx, who obscured Shelley)—her castle ass serves both offensive/defensive, but also deathly and medicinal capabilities, during ludo-Gothic BDSM; within and upon itself, it holds the mighty power patriarchs seek to master but always fail, by design, to pin down: "corruption" as data. A terrorist encapsulation of chaos, her androgynous hyphenations (e.g., mouth and fang, sex and death, male and female*, etc) gleefully and wrathfully disrupt state aims passed cryptomimetically† along: spectres not of Marx, per se (re: Derrida, 1993), but Mary Shelley's "Medusa," undercutting the state (and Cartesian thought) per a modern Prometheus (re: "Making Demons"). For all its ostensible confusion, then, "evil" is an argument within a position—one to poetically occupy thus play with things not set in stone: to make love and war, "as one" (and built for it, below); re: "When the Man comes around, show him your Aegis!"

*Medusa and monstrous-feminine being classically female, in Western canon (re: "Angry Mothers," 2024), but allowing for male and intersex varieties; e.g., trans women.

†Re: Castricano (2001). 

(artist: Persephone van der Waard; cited: "It Began with a Whisper," 2025)

Our doing so is two-fold, then: understanding the process while aiding it, all to liberate land, labor and sex from state chains (with Gothic forgeries/fatal homecomings); i.e., onstage and off, using the same half-real language. For this particular exercise, I articulate cryptonymy through the abjection process; i.e., both being things to embody "on the Aegis," reversing abjection through an apotropaic, anisotropic approach: one unpaid labor embodies Gorgons with. They do so while breaking Capitalist Realism—ergo the state under Marxist-Leninism—on their backsides' labor taken back, in duality (there being no singular interpretation/function to such monstrous-feminine poetics). The state will rape us, regardless; reclaiming our dignity and our power invariably happens, mid-alienation, while hugging the alien (2024): humanizing ourselves and those we defend as alien, all while scratching fascist impostors using our own prickly castles' black-mirror functionalities (the Aegis classically a mirror shield with anti-predation qualities the artist's body can assume, below)! It's not merely a question of aesthetics, then, but power flowing through aesthetics in a particular direction; i.e., towards workers, "on the Aegis," whenever the state reliably starts to die (the Gothic concerning ambiguous decay of imperfect mastery but also transfer of power under state entropy towards vengeful slaves). The night is young but the hour is nigh; show them your Aegis, making them "bleed" whatever "blood" rebellion demands through paradoxical exposure! Become the Gorgon as "castle-like," specifically a castle of rapturous, maze-like* terror fucking poetically† back during state crisis (when state power is weak, therefore susceptible)!

*Re: Metroidvania being the focus of my PhD, concerning Amazons/the monstrous-feminine and ludo-Gothic BDSM.

†For further examinations of the Gothic's poetic vein, consider my Poetry Module's "The Medieval" (2024). 

"A Material Girl in a Material World": Embodying the Gorgon as Dialectical-Material

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

Playfulness aside, dialectical-material considerations pointedly remain—with play being a form of work that workers, especially sex workers, embody through ludo-Gothic BDSM: embodying the retro-future, 18th-century aesthetic (argument) of the Neo-Gothic castle, but especially its ironic (salubrious) space of rape play that speaks, mid-Amazonomachia, to larger social and material forces "at war." As I write in, "Nancy Drew Syndrome":

"Capital alienates everything," argues Marx, in "Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts" (1844; cited, 2011: Asher Horowitz' "Perspectives on Politics"); "capital sexualizes everything," I reply (source: "Thesis Statement," 2023)—meaning to fetishize the alien in dialectical-material ways workers can reclaim (the Base) through media (the Superstructure) extending from their bodies; i.e., "The collective, holistic idea is to break Capitalist Realism vis-à-vis the historical-material reality that capital not only alienates everything but sexualizes/fetishizes it, too. The latter idea is actually the subject of my PhD, which concerns various ways to challenge Capitalist Realism during ludo-Gothic BDSM" [source: "My Larger Body of Work," deeper in]; e.g., queer folk as normally "pimped out"

In turn, capital and state power historically alienate workers to pimp nature as monstrous-feminine; i.e., during the liminal hauntology of war/danger disco when capital starts to die (a traveling castle/pirate-like destructor, mise-en-abyme; re: "Castles in the Flesh," 2024); i.e., including queer folk, sadly eaten by themselves and by other whores "of nature" (versus straight white men owning nature, under Cartesian dualism): alien, homely/unhomely beings, out from a fearsome semi-imaginary past come barbarically home (spectres not just "of Marx," but Medusa the butt pirate embodying the Gothic castle's hot portents of doom, above). They're notably garbage, but the very things empowering us during asymmetrical warfare embodying "castle," therefore Gorgon, as the terrifying antidote to state gaslights; re: mid-cryptonymy and abjection (terror language, aka "the kissing cousin of force" as Asprey puts it; re: War in the Shadows, 1975); i.e., workers given "strange appetites" by state abuse, which they then do different things with that help or hinder workers: "When such a castle appears, it is time to be afraid; the colonial harvest is at hand. Yet, precisely because the state does not hold a monopoly over violence, terror and morphological expression, a demon or castle needn't spell our end; it can represent our sole means of attack, reclaiming said poetics' endless inventiveness to turn colonizer fears back into their hopelessly scared brains" (source: "Prey as Liberators," 2024).

(artist, right: Frank Frazetta; source: left—cited: "What Is the Gothic?" 2023)

Fatal homecomings and Gothic speak to the barbaric boom-or-bust cycles capital historically-materially plays out; i.e., while decaying towards fascism but also Communism. In turn, class war is ass war but one whose ravenous "vampirism" goes both ways, thereby scratching others mid-love-tap to "draw blood" for different, dialectical-material aims; i.e., further than Marx admittedly dared; re: camping him by expressing rebellion in notably antiquated, neo-medieval language; e.g., like the vampire castle, or the castle-like body as Gorgon-esque to vampiric, therefore queer degrees (re: "Making Marx Gay"): by evoking the Gorgon as a morphologically alien, "death on two legs" sodomy weapon of sex, terror and force—one whose ensuing unheimlich isn't always "strict" (fearsome, rude, etc), but nonetheless "marries" pleasure and pain endemic to Medusa (the recipient of imbricating persecution language; e.g., blood libel, sodomy and witchcraft; re: "Idle Hands," 2024). So might sex workers "become the Gorgon" in a variety of ways (some bloodier than others, below)! Power and death take endless forms, mid-fetish—i.e., as cosmically blunt-force, gruesome, "lightning rod" metaphors; e.g., for hysteria, unruly biology and Wandering Womb, but also forbidden love (even finding love when others think you "unlovable")—but generally assume two distinct functions:  empowering workers or the state, not both. Such operatic wickedness, under a Protestant ethic, classically arbitrates in highly animal ways: volatile sex objects, their criminal, alter-ego prone to scratching deeper than some would like (more on this exact process, in a moment).

(artist: Claudio Berga; cited: "Playing with Power (to Further or Reverse Abjection, mid-Cryptonymy)" from "Nancy Drew Syndrome")

Whatever the fetish's form, it generally describes a malign status (which abjection is); i.e., sex as alien under capital, which alienates and fetishizes everything through fascist means: during mirror syndrome criminalizing nature (as alien). All this can reverse, of course, but does so historically during cryptonymy and the abjection process "taken back"; re: the oldest struggle enforced by state powers: pimps and whores, the latter embodying the Gorgon as something the former chases down and rapes anew (the state rapes by design, making workers demonic, animal and undead; re: "A Cruel Angel's Thesis," 2024). Ludo-Gothic BDSM places "rape" in quotes to achieve dialectical-material reversal. To reverse abjection, then, is to reverse the state's usual, pimp-like arguments; i.e., of revenge by nature as alien, criminal, etc—one I call "the whore's revenge" when successful (re: "Rape Reprise"), and which "Raising Awareness" metes out while dealing with people like Bad Empanada, "playing the pimp": the whore versus the pimp, out from Antiquity (where Medusa hails from) and into imperial spheres under Western models transplanted eastwards: production and profit punching down at nature cheapened in whore-like ways, moving money through nature (as Patel and Moore put it). The reclamatory idea, for whores, is to push back using Medusa's aforementioned "wide load": our cryptonymy's monstrous-feminine bodies and labor humanizing the harvest, therefore alienation through abjection reversed (re: "Nature Is Food"). "Seize the means," the Gothic a potent instrument in performative duality but also inherited confusion (chaos): "we're just playing." Are we? Hush, darling! You don't want to give the game away!

(cited: "Leaving the Closet; or, a Trans Woman's Scholarly Contributions to Older Histories of Sodomy and Queer Love," 2024)

Survival and ambiguity historically walk arm-in-arm; cryptonymy—specifically revolutionary cryptonymy* embodying the Gorgon's "wide load" (or darkness visible, above)—embodies our means of "robbing the pimp," under surveillance. Poetry is play and play = thought played both dialectically-materially out, synthesizing socially-psychosexually through work ("matter shapes consciousness" and "consciousness maintains matter"; re: Singh, unpacking Marx). This includes the Gorgon's own "brothel espionage"; i.e., as something Numinous to perceive, chase down and stand in for to extant, Promethean degrees. Such quests are circular in execution, seeing future workers historically-materially evoke past forms of struggle, push-pull; e.g., white straight men, as Devendra Varma writes: "Man's first stirring of religious instinct was his acute horror of this powerful Deity—and it was to such primitive emotion that he reverted, emancipated from reason, but once again ignorant of God, his spiritual world in chaos. Primarily the Gothic novels arose out of a quest for the numinous [emphasis, me] (source: The Gothic Flame, 1923). For a trans-woman sex worker like me, though, this means Medusa and her revenge made manifest: existing in spite of state power to outlive her jailors, any-which-way (often per Rudolph Otto's mysterium tremendum concept, below).

*Refer to Volume One's "Introducing Revolutionary Cryptonymy" (2024) and Volume Three's "Chapter Five: 'Rebellious Subterfuge'" (2025) for a good introduction/exploration of cryptonymy tied to heavy metal (and the stuff that heavy metal sings about, from damsels to demons). Also refer to "Understanding Vampires" and "The World Is a Vampire" (2024); i.e., to see these ideas explored by me through Marx' work. My work is holistic, combining cryptonymy with other Gothic theories; e.g., abjection and the monstrous-feminine, per Julia Kristeva and Barbara Creed; i.e., us versus them and femme fortes/fatales through a revolutionary Gothic aesthetic reversing abjection "on the Aegis": one existing in duality to send/carry power anisotropically back to workers "in the gutter," and where flow determines function, not aesthetic (the whore's revenge versus profit, reversing terrorist/counterterrorist, mid-abjection). In short, these topics are undeniably massive, ones we'll dialectically-materially survey here; i.e., given we explore them far deeper elsewhere (re: Harmony Corrupted in "Nancy Drew Syndrome," below); e.g., to reconsider kayfabe and vampirism, thus reclaim these ideas ourselves during ludo-Gothic BDSM: by using what we got to double, then push back on state praxis (and of which Gothic poetry very much is, Marx [and his spectres] onwards)!

(model and artist: Blxxd Bunny and Persephone van der Waard; cited: "The Quest for Power," 2023)

Though not always, those treated as alien by state powers commonly reify the alien; i.e., as power to pursue, seeking the "perfect domme" (castle or otherwise) during calculated risk (which ludo-Gothic BDSM is). In turn, earthly whores embody the Numinous for our ability to produce, such "spectres of Medusa" (not just Marx) striving—from Mary Shelley and Frankenstein (1818), onwards—to envision a better world; i.e., one for whores, and all while standing on the corpse of empire having pimped us, time-out-of-mind! Such is the Gorgon, its evocation "on the Aegis" (re: by the whore radiating power) making the pimp—usually a Cartesian man of science or some-such "thinking being" (with an "Ozymandias complex," including Maoists)—go completely catatonic! Big things have small beginnings, and—just as capital can play out, "in small," through different whore-like actors pimping Medusa—so can Communism (of the Gothic type, from Marx to us) yield awesomely campy potentials; i.e., that reverse the scheme, mid-abjection: "making Marx gay" to Promethean, palliative-Numinous extremes, mise-en-abyme. "Look on our Works, Ye Mighty, and despair!" So can whores, during their glorious terrorist/counterterrorist revenge, smash Capitalist Realism apart (the latter a state of mind informed by material conditions, one which whores can shape through our own Satanic, "danger disco" implements—above and below)! "She mighty mighty!"

I digress, that's about as deep as we'll explore abjection, here. Concerning "Nancy Drew Syndrome," please read "A Note About Abjection and Reversing it during Rape Play" from that essay (as I won't have time to further unpack its ideas, here; e.g., the Promethean Quest). Even so, vampirism is something we'll get to, deeper in: as dualistic, therefore anisotropic; i.e., its function/meaning determines by direction, specifically where it sucks power when dialectically-materially "scratching" this or that, mid-abjection (using what Creed calls "her terrifying powers," said scratching potential, ergo anti-predation [apotropaic] elements exuded by decapitated bodies and dismembered heads, alike). Such terrifying things, "laid rudely bare," can freeze viewers solid; their sex-as-weapon terror can also provoke onlookers, vaso-vagal, to attack—meaning despite an undercover cop's desire to "lie in wait," the ensuing (and sudden) fight response denuding thus betraying the pimp-in-question's true fascist intent!

(artist: Jeremy Anninos)

The Scratching Method

Scratch a SWERF/TERF and a fascist bleeds. I call this "the scratching method," mid-abjection; i.e., a given "fortress"/pleasure house of pain scratching a potential enemy to see how they bleed, including the vampiric function of the Gorgon exposing prudes (which fascists maximally are, behind concentric veneers): as something to cryptonymically pimp or push back with, during the abjection process! In keeping with Gothic poetics, such materiel scratches through oxymoron and paradox, combining the senses to achieve fantastic results (of a notably dialectical-material, if trippy-at-times, effect; re: Fisher's acid Communism; see: "Call of the Wild," 2025). That being said, the focus here isn't the black mirror's "inkblot"; it's how such mechanisms can change the way we see the world (ergo ourselves)—i.e., as alien, "under the gun." Canon-versus-camp, the dogmatic approach (thus function) of the state (and its leaders/servants) monopolize vampirism (and other Gothic poetics); i.e., to benefit the ruling class, including under Marxist-Leninism, as something to scratch and scratch with (which we'll also examine, deeper in). Like a vampire's fangs, the state weaponizes whatever it can, DARVO-and-obscurantism—all to pimp out the usual prey the state and its rulers categorically feed on: whores and those treated like whores, Gorgon-style (e.g., a "vampire" to stake, below, feared for its transformative power);

(artist: Harmony Corrupted; cited: "With Harmony's Help: Addressing Volume Three's Grand Emptiness and Ambitions through a Good Friend," 2025)

i.e., by state-compelled "celibacy"/the Protestant ethic—with Mao, for example, actually being a massive whore/pimp triangulating celibacy as forced onto others. This includes Bad Empanada, an actual incel who wants Mao levels of power over those he deems "degenerate," thus inferior to himself and his poisonously reactionary belief system. Throttling the Earth to rape it (and any worker "of nature," mid-DARVO), said procedure (abjection) lifts directly from Marxist-Leninism's own problematic past: one parroting capital and Cartesian thought's vampirically harmful elements; i.e., raping nature by design, and all despite any declarations to the contrary! Under Capitalist Realism, any exposure of care/sex without a husband (or similar owner/owned arrangement) threatens to undo state control over such things: to be seen, not heard—the "loudest" whores being seen without a pimp, their own play putting "rape" cryptonymically in quotes, Gorgon-style; i.e., by showing our "homewrecker" selves, ironically in public unsupervised during ludo-Gothic BDSM, or within media policed as such; re (from the Demon Module):

Fascism doesn't fight fair—is when Imperialism comes home to empire as something to defend from "us"; the world, as a system of exploitation, only "ends" when Nazis stop being Nazis and lay down their arms to dismantle the state with us against the elite. Until then, they conjure up their own "moons" to hunt us down with: warships of all kinds, size and shapes, onstage and off.

However false or real these are, they remain a performance we can decolonize on the same battlefields, be those on terra firma or up in the clouds overhead, the state of exception expanding into outer space (with Musk desperate to go to Mars for some reason). "And the moon rattles in the sky like a piece of angry candy…" With that bearing down on us, it's normal to question our sanity in fighting something so stupidly big. / But the reality is, they only have what power you give them and you can only see such things in pieces while cutting them down to size. That happens in the day-to-day spheres the capitalist cannot control. He's too big and fat, only waiting for a worldwide rebellion to come along and burst his bubble; i.e., colonies always have a built-in time limit with a lit fuse, and America is just another police state whose time is running out (source: "Going Mask-Off: Showing Jadis' Face while Doubling Them," 2025).

To it, the Gorgon's "scratching" method is an ostinato/military refrain, one that specifically outs fascism-in-disguise by turning the moon on the lunatic: reversing abjection by showing the world how such "paragons" treat whores, but also women, sex educators, non-white persons, non-Christians, and/or disabled, Indigenous, Pagan, GNC people, etc, whenever push comes to shove (and to notably castle-like degrees; e.g., "that's no moon, it's a space station!"). The load isn't "wide" just for its size (though it often is sizeable, above); it's wide for its destructively (transformative) planetary implications: the sudden frightening-yet-fascinating appearance of a Big Whore whose pirate-grade demands "suddenly threaten" a white planet with "black" outcomes (the captive but also conqueror's fantasy committed by the state's usual victims). Under Capitalist Realism, people become off-balance, thus prone to poetic suggestion. While we can camp such things, ourselves, it's canonically a false flag (or "Black Veil," in Radcliffean language)—one with monomythic, cops-and-robbers refrains; i.e., the very cartographic sort that weird incels like Bad Empanada utilize: blowing the fascist whistle on "escaped Gorgons," despite abstaining from popular media, themselves. So does form follow function, sex a weapon to levy against workers thereof, by state enforcers (which pimps are, raping nature through monstrous-feminine vaudeville, below).

(artist, left: Wonseok Choi; right: Zoe Volf; cited: "Power in Gothic: Vampires and Castles" from "Nancy Drew Syndrome")

The pimp's argument, then, is one of abjecting whores, essentially "kettling" them regardless of appearance or to what degree/register of sex the pimp consumes/the whore "scratches" them (so-called "hair of the dog"); e.g., eunuchs classically being harem guards, and Bad Empanada still consuming sex, mid-abjection; i.e., despite his puritanical implications of total celibacy/abstinence from "degenerate" things (re: slandering me). A pimp's a pimp, their punishment for the whore administered whenever she challenges state power through built-in contradictions: the state's perpetual, perennial demand for merchandise simultaneously slave and enemy/scapegoat (the whore's paradox hyphenating virgin/whore as one-in-the-same, their "castles" both domestic and alien to state lands; re: "Rape Reprise"). There must always be a whore to pimp, a pimp to police whores "of nature" through the state's "16th century ecology" (re: Patel and Moore); i.e., those who—including actors of a Marxist-Leninist persuasion—apologize for state abuse while fetishizing dictators repeatedly called "necessary" when raping nature (e.g., Lenin, Stalin and Mao): as "asking for it," mid-apostacy. Hardly a question of "if," so does a given cop (class traitor with cultural and racial elements) behead the Gorgon or burn the witch—vicious in deed, yet as mundanely as one might prune a rose; i.e., clinically for its thorns getting "in the way" ("mowing the lawn," as the Israelis put it). The act is both savage and banal, its double standards entirely enjoyed by state enforcers pimping nature; i.e., to paradoxical, operatically extirpatory highs and lows: "damned if you do, damned if you don't," canonical abjection forever keeping nature-as-whore "in check." There's always another castle to whitewash.

Under Cartesian dualism, such persons categorically monopolize violence, terror and monsters for state continuation (re: Weber, Asprey and me); e.g., Gorgons, sodomy and vampires as state-sponsored terror weapons, but also Amazons and anal sex (re: "Our Sweet Revenge," 2025); i.e., to further abjection, therefore pimp care and sex work, virgin/whore: as historically unpaid for the sake of productivity and/or profit, pimping nature and those "of it" as monstrous-feminine (re: "Nature Is Food"). You don't have to "sample" the merchandise to consume it—with pimping of the puritanical, ethnocentric variety a form of interaction; i.e., that doubles for consumption, if only to keep whores vengefully in check, thus the land (as Bad Empanada does, mid-witch-hunt: "she scratched me, the sex pest from America!"). Doing so per Cartesian, heteronormative (nuclear) and settler-colonial models (re: "The State: Its Key Tools"), such apologia furthers abjection through canonical Gothic (specifically its invention of terrorism, from the 1790s into later epochs; re: Crawford). The state fights fire with Promethean fire, said fight stolen from the mythical past; i.e., the Gorgon's demonic, undead, animal cryptonymy (the castle) bearing out socio-material ties that threaten reversal across space and time (stolen generations, the living dead rising from the grave, mid-apocalypse [revelation] to enact rebellion; e.g., I Am Legend and Night of the Living Dead, 1954 and 1968)! Pick your poison, then go to town:

(cited: "The Imperial Boomerang, part one: Survival," 2024)

Fight Fire with Fire (the Promethean Quest)

And yet, such models and monopolies are not all-powerful, workers able to reclaim such things, "on the Aegis"; i.e., categorically under duress, meaning on our oft-unpaid bodies as mirror-like, per Kristeva's abjection process and Creed's monstrous-feminine (vampire or not). That's what Gothic Communism does, the whore's Promethean Quest "fighting fire with fire"/embodying the Gorgon (as castle-like demon, zombie, werewolf, etc) versus the state and Marxist-Leninism as much as Western capital (re: "On Sex Work," deeper in; see, also: "Showing Off during Playtime" from "Nancy Drew Syndrome"). It's that or state shift (climate change); so we may as well push back, "ruling in Hell" whenever possible (until Medusa the planet goes feral, eating the Capitalocene and everything with it; re: me, vis-à-vis Patel and Moore). The fact remains, incels are witch hunters are witch hunters hate sex save to police it. Indeed, "Gothic" under Capitalist Realism remains forever loaded with world-ending implications; i.e., on par with Lady Godiva, on her famous horse: something you want but can never catch, running both towards and away from, Scooby-Doo-style. The chase is the point, its pandemonium developing Communism or preventing it, mid-poetics, till the end of days.

(artist: Frank Frazetta; cited: "Nature Is Food")

"The cake is a lie." The trick, when reclaiming our power "on the Aegis," is using such wide loads' "fire of the gods" to anti-predatory degrees: paralyzing our unironic pursuers machinery without tokenizing ourselves (see: next section); re: fascism and Communism, exploitation and liberation—all share the same stages, the same trashily "Gothic" poetry (thus labor) being policed, poison-was-the-cure. State actors (thus traitors) historically assert dominance over those they pimp, in some shape or form; e.g., by calling us vampires and Gorgons (or ghouls, zombies, "sex pests," whatever); i.e., thereby distracting from the vampiric harm state proponents cause, over time; re: mid-abjection, whose verminized chattelization we reverse when paradoxically outing our abusers, mid-exposure: during brothel espionage coded as "mere play" (silence is genocide), and by using the same policed, cryptonymic language "of nature" for competing aims (which includes our vampire-like bodies). By hating us to puritanical degrees, for example, Bad Empanada grants us power against him—specifically to expose him, on the Aegis, while showing him what he wants: power as something he'll take by force, like fascists always do (storming Dracula's castle). For them and theirs, a given "planet" is theirs to invade and possess, especially if they don't indulge (re: the Protestant ethic): the pleasure of power over others, the bearers thereof systemically entitled to "all things" as God-given (or at least ordained by the secular state as god-like; e.g., Stalin and the Soviets, despite their own professed "atheism," raping the planet to clinically industrial degrees—below).

(artist: Adolf Menzel)

Workers-vs-the-state, anything goes provided it outs our enemies acting in bad faith; i.e., hanging them with their own rope, meaning once they see what the state wants them to pimp "on the loose": our historically unpaid, Aegis-like bodies to scribble death warrants upon/deliver violence towards, decry as "terrorist," treat as "degenerate," storm as "castle," etc. "Humanize the harvest; expose the state as inhumane" (source: "Paid Labor," 2024). The fact remains, only a pimp would act as Bad Empanada does; i.e., shaking like a leaf whenever he sees censored nudity (re: fig leaves): through calls of violence towards the usual victims that state power demands, carving the Earth up "in small." So do state forces, celibate or not, rape and reap the planet and its alien populace; i.e., by design, ultimately toying with Numinous forces to justify extermination (e.g., the Alien Queen notably insectoid, perishing under military optimism and its Promethean refrains' canonical essentialism, 2021 and 2024)! For state actors, it's never actually about "protecting others" (especially women and children); it's about controlling them, under crisis—with paid revolutionaries often policing unpaid revolutionaries, "on the Left" (a fact we'll further explore, in "Concerning Marxist-Leninism"). Such is fascism, even fascism "dressed up" to conceal/reveal its pimping with celibate, Maoist veneers; i.e., abjecting nature/whores, like usual (which Marxist-Leninism historically does; re: Lenin's dictatorship of the proletariat, which we'll critique when we get to Stalin and Lenin, but also Mao's hypocritical antics).

Cannibalizing labor and nature to outrageously Promethean degrees, the state and its vampirism destroy by design, but also through consequence—a vanishing point built "on ashes of something not quite present," on par with the Gothic castle's signature disorder as space-of-concealment (source: Jerrold Hogle's "The Restless Labyrinth: Cryptonymy in the Gothic Novel," 1980): a "golem" or "gargoyle," one whose "fear factory" overflows with illusory power the likes of which the Gorgon (and her force-of-nature, kaiju-style reckonings) skillfully embody! Pimps fear the whore who pushes back, the Numinous a girl's best friend in this respect (and not-so-secret weapon, below): resolving labor disputes less through immediate daring and "violence" (read: naked bodies), and more as fearsome-fascinating displays touching hearts and minds using Gothic poetry. That's what reversing abjection is, the Promethean Quest something to cryptonymically embody as such, love-is-a-battlefield (mutants to fuck "like an animal," mighty conquerors to flirt with, etc).

(artist: Persephone van der Waard; cited: "Paid Labor")

In Conclusion

To conclude this poetic exercise, the Promethean Quest can further or reverse abjection; i.e., while scratching impostors in Gorgon-like ways. So "scratch" a TERF/SWERF and watch them shed fascist blood—with your Aegis, its "wide load" asking for equal rights cryptonymically upon its surface! This includes equal pay for sex work (above); i.e., historically unpaid work breaking Capitalist Realism through the exchange on multiple registers: "To ask for capitalism to pay for care is to call for an end to capitalism," write Patel and Moore (source). In turn, SWERFs are Nazis-by-another-name, Bad Empanada a pimp who exposes himself when seeing our "fire" laid bare: our whore's rebellious inability to segregate/entertain the very state-hegemonic stereotypes he wants to enforce. Said process cuts both ways, and all's fair in love and war! Class war is ass war that can reverse abjection for dialectical-material aims! Land back, labor back, sex and monsters back (meaning the undead, demons and all of nature as monstrous-feminine modules, play-as-praxis)! The state is straight, therefore ASAB! Same goes for dictators and the bad actors (or empanadas) emulating them; i.e., to embarrassing degrees (e.g., Mao, which we'll get to). End the partition, then sit back and watch; i.e., as the pimp-in-question—suddenly faced with nature-as-whore, teleported to homely spheres—ignominiously craps their pants (as Bad Empanada, ever the incel, has repeatedly done regarding me)!

Exercise or not, we'll employ such poetry to dialectically-materially address a variety of criminogenic factors; i.e., mid-abjection, under capital and state powers. This betrayal partly includes Bad Empanada, he and his playing fascism out, in disguise; it also includes Marxist-Leninism as a whole pimping nature and sex work, which we'll now examine theoretically while keeping our dossier and poetry in mind.

On Sex Work versus Marxist-Leninism

"On Sex Work" critiques not only Bad Empanada's TERF/SWERF-style behaviors, but the very ideology (and its practitioners) who, I feel, best describe/support his actions: Marxist-Leninism.

  • "Regarding Nudity (Censored or Not) as Educational, Not Criminal (during intersectional struggle)": Explores how nudity and sex work aren't automatically "degenerate," but valid tools of rebellion historically pimped, virgin/whore-style, by state forces furthering abjection (excluding care work, sex or otherwise).
    • "On Nudity, Cocottes and Red Scare (and Critiquing Soviet Aesthetics during Socialist Realism, feat. Lady Izdihar)": Weighs the values of more modest aesthetics within revolutionary action, but also considers their exclusionary potential; i.e., within Soviet history/nostalgia under Socialist Realism and Marxist-Leninism.
  • "Concerning Marxist-Leninism (versus Gothic [gay-anarcho] Communism; feat. Socialism for All and Chemical Mind)": Examines a maxim of mine, "the state is straight"; i.e., by taking Marxist-Leninism and its own sexism, transphobia and whorephobia (then and now) to task.
    • "Suffer the Little Children": Marxist-Leninist Transphobia among Token Gen-Zers and Alphas (side bar)": Considers Marxist-Leninism as historically toxic (exploitative) towards the state's youth, including token youths; i.e., through maximalist, exclusionary elements (of a fascist sort) borrowed from older history.
  • "Notes on Lenin, Stalin, and Why Marxist-Leninism Historically Sucks for Women and Queer People (with Bad Empanada being functionally Marxist-Leninist)": Grapples, "warts and all," with the historical figures of Marxism, Leninism and Marxist-Leninism that today's MLs uncritically dogmatize; i.e., worshipping said men by overlooking the tremendous harm they and their enduring legacies cause women, queer folk, sex workers, and other minorities.
    • "Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism vs Marxist-Leninism": Pits my formulation of Communism against the classic imperial form.
    • "Stalin and Company Haunting Marxist-Leninism into Present Discourse; or, Their Toxic Legacies Polluting Present Praxis": Outlines the broader historical-material issues present within Marxist-Leninism; i.e., from Stalin and Lenin, onwards.
    • "Further Critiques on Marxist-Leninism (from Other Researchers)"
    • "State Kayfabe and Vampirism: Emulating Marxist-Leninism's Dictators, from Stalin to Mao"
      • "Stalin's Kayfabe: the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact"
      • "Mao's Vampirism: Bad Empanada's Favorite Dictator?"
    • "In Closing: Such Men Suck, and How to Take Our Power Back from Them "on the Aegis": Faces facts regarding Mao; i.e., that Mao was an entirely awful human being who Bad Empanada wants to emulate—one who preached celibacy to his followers while refusing to practice it himself, killed millions of people and denied it, and weaponized his nation's youth to help him hold onto power afterwards.

Regarding Nudity (Censored or Not) as Educational, Not Criminal (during intersectional struggle)

(artist: Delilah Gallo)

The work that my friends and I do aims to combat our criminalizing by state powers to a universally intersectional degree; e.g., Delilah Gallo concluding our interview with

Land back. Free Palestine, Sudan, Congo, Syria, Ethiopia, Cuba, Korea, Vietnam, Hawai'i, Puerto Rico, Turtle Island, Lebanon, and all occupied, oppressed, embargoed land. Give to mutual aid. Learn about the indigenous nation whose land you are on. Lead with kindness but don't shy away from conflict. Always ask yourself who is being left out and why (it is almost always going to be disabled people, indigenous people, trans people, children). Start a garden. Make some art. Stay curious. Don't obey rules that don't make sense. Be loud about injustice. Abolish ICE. Abolish the police. Abolish the government. All power to the people. And wear a mask and test for Covid! (source: "Hailing Hellions: An Interview with Delilah Gallo").

This struggle is shared but also dialectical-material (anisotropic, dualistic)—meaning with other minorities under capital having the ability to rebel, but also gentrify and decay in different ways; re (from Volume Two):

Capitalism achieves profit by moving money through nature [from Patel and Moore]; 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 as a matter of complicated (anisotropic) exchange unto itself, but also shapeshifting and knowledge exchange vis-à-vis nature as monstrous-feminine: something to destroy by the state or defend from it (and its trifectas, monopolies, etc) using the same threatening aesthetics of power and death, decay and rape (source: "A Cruel Angel's Thesis")

It also includes workers punching down at nudity as up with nudity—meaning as a poetically educational device: a weapon tied to/extending from our very bodies and art used to paradoxically set workers (and nature) free from nuclear/state models (and modes) of oppression! Rebellion, contrary to more Puritanical MLs, doesn't actually require you to be celibate or philistine (as Bad Empanada demonstrably is). Quite the opposite, you can play with/embody sex, drugs and rock 'n roll to reclaim the Base/recultivate the Superstructure for worker needs (re: "On Twin Trees," 2023)! Fuck the state; class war is ass war and all war is predicated on deception having naked characteristics (see: cryptonymy footnote on the double operation of show/conceal, further down). "We're 'just' whores, my ass—but on that ass the code for universal rebellion is written!"

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

That's probably a lot. Ergo, I quickly want to address the idea of nudity-as-educational, here—such praxis (and its synthesis) appealing to an intersectional struggle hugging the alien (sex work, in this case); i.e., in ways that navigate various axes of privilege/oppression (ergo double standards): to find similarity amid difference during ludo-Gothic BDSM (a term I coined; see: "Paratextual (Gothic) Documents" for all of them). This requires punching up together during the whore's collective revenge versus profit/the state (the pimp's revenge). Doing so remains a dialectical-material poetic force, working in duality versus our foes on a shared Aegis, onstage and off; re: "Rape Reprise"!

We'll unpack that (a bit), here; we'll also discuss several paradoxes whores historically-materially face: of exposure and being whores, while also providing different intersectional devices for freeing or pimping labor as monstrous-feminine mid-aesthetic (e.g., Prince Shakur from the racial standpoint and Lady Izdihar concerning Red Scare). As we survey such things, here, remember that power is anisotropic. Hence, flow of power (not aesthetic) determines function, mid-struggle as open disguise—dialectical-material scrutiny (and praxis) occupying the same performative spaces being profoundly liminal (with power something to perform; re: "Notes on Power")! Rebellion, however covert, is indiscrete as much as not (re: during the cryptonymy process reversing abjection), meaning determined through struggle (re: Douglass) insofar as such things are not set in stone (no singular definitions, ergo arbitrations and monopolies)! Demands include the ability to be seen when rendered invisible:

(artist: Édouard Debat-Ponsan)

First, those who betray are cops, those who rebel rebels (e.g., Satan in Paradise Lost, 1667)—the former framing the latter as "more alien" despite capital alienizing and sexualizing all workers, pimp/whore; re: my PhD thesis argument, "Capitalism sexualizes everything" (source: "Thesis Paragraph," 2023), which occurs per a harmful division of nature (therefore labor) centuries old (and built atop older imperiums): man/woman, but also the modular colocations "straight white colonizer" versus "gay non-white colonized" (the class traitor still being a worker but one who betrays their class interests for the elite—often along cultural and racial lines); i.e., to modular degrees of imbricating persecution language (re: "Idle Hands")—one that treats care work (including sex work) as paradoxically less valuable/more precious: something to discredit and cover up to pimp it, virgin/whore during mirror syndrome (to monopolize the Aegis aka Medusa's mirror shield to "pimp the Gorgon" [and her nudity's testimony to rape as an anti-predation device] by blaming the whore/victim, above).

Lucky for us, such traitors do not monopolize such things. To it, the very alien solidarity and intersectional consciousness I speak of (to challenge our pimps) includes Delilah and I

(model and artist: Delilah Gallo and Persephone van der Waard)

but also other people I work with, too; i.e., of differing modular oppressions; e.g., my friend and muse, Clockwork Rhxbynn and her girlfriend Valaroy (both trans):

(artist: Clockwork Rhxbynn and Shipwreck Valaroy)

So despite whatever Bad Empanada says, sex is a valid revolutionary weapon, one that ML prudes like him poop their pants about/try to pimp us for using (often against them for acting like pimps to begin with); i.e., "When the Man comes around, show him your Aegis!" (re: "It Began with a Whisper"). He'll reliably "crash out" (as Bad Empanada has repeatedly done, here and elsewhere; i.e., from an allergy to sex and social-sexual ["ace"] labor expression/value: public nudism).

Furthermore, power is the poetic ability to reclaim our labor (and the land and sex) from knowing-better creeps like Bad Empanada. Alienated from such things to a cop-like degree, they serve profit/the state to such a degree that merely using sex—specifically censored nudity—leads them to decry us for "sexually harassing" them and the entire planet they apparently "own": to devalue our labor's educational value to a reactionary bourgeois degree; i.e., while attacking historically unpaid care workers, framing their doing not just versus alien or exotic beings, but criminal (and which Bad Empanada certainly describes us as, under a Protestant ethic; source skeet, Bad Empanada: October 28th, 2025—screencaps in "On Tokenism"). For him, we're not victims, but a menace to society that—to save society from during Capitalist Realism—must be closeted, enslaved and killed. MLs can be pimps, too, Bad Empanada pimping out what is alien/other to him (sex), and through a high degree of arrogance to boot (the sort noted not just by me, but by MLs, too; e.g., Socialism for All's "Bad Empanada's COVID Take: An Ill-Informed Mishmash of Minimizer Talking Points," 2022).

(artists: Avram Finkelstein, Brian Howard, Oliver Johnston, Charles Kreloff, Chris Lione, and Jorge Socarrás)

The paradox, then, is partly one of exposure; i.e., silence = death and our struggle* remains valid despite sexually repressed weirdos like Bad Empanada criminalizing us in exclusionary modes of revolutionary discourse; i.e., incel MLs giving other MLs a bad name, scapegoating nature out from the 16th century onwards. It's "thinking beings" vs "extended beings," per Cartesian thought as described by Patel and Moore:

*Meaning after the AIDS crisis, which the above poster (1987) belongs to; i.e., after the 1980s, the AIDS crisis still ongoing around the world (re: "The World Is a Vampire").

The inventors of Nature were philosophers as well as conquerors and profiteers. In 1641, Descartes offered what would become the first two laws of capitalist ecology. The first is seemingly innocent. Descartes distinguished between mind and body, using the Latin res cogitans and res extensa to refer to them. Reality, in this view, is composed of discrete "thinking things" and "extended things." Humans (but not all humans) were thinking things; Nature was full of extended things. The era's ruling classes saw most human beings—women, peoples of color, Indigenous Peoples—as extended, not thinking, beings. This means that Descartes' philosophical abstractions were practical instruments of domination: they were real abstractions with tremendous material force. And this leads us to Descartes' second law of capitalist ecology: European civilization (or "we," in Descartes' word) must become "the masters and possessors of nature." Society and Nature were not just existentially separate; Nature was something to be controlled and dominated by Society. The Cartesian outlook, in other words, shaped modern logics of power as well as thought.

[...] The invention of Nature and Society was gendered at every turn. The binaries of Man and Woman, Nature and Society, drank from the same cup. Nature, and its boundary with Society, was "gyn/ecological" from the outset. Through this radically new mode of organizing life and thought, Nature became not a thing but a strategy that allowed for the ethical and economic cheapening of life. Cartesian dualism was and remains far more than a descriptive statement: it is a normative statement of how to best organize power and hierarchy, Humanity and Nature, Man and Woman, Colonizer and Colonized. Although the credit (and blame) is shared by many, it makes sense to call this a Cartesian revolution. Here was an intellectual movement that shaped not only ways of thinking but also ways of conquering, commodifying and living [... that] made thinking, and doable, the colonial project of mapping and domination. [...] The modern map did not merely describe the world; it was a technology of conquest (source: A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things*).

*I.e., a cheapening of nature through care work by a pimp-like proletariat, East or West:

The technologies of employer power in the workplace are so pervasive that they even made an appearance in a place we might least expect: the Soviet Union, where workers themselves—at least on paper—controlled the conditions of their labor. Although much is still made of how distinct the Soviets were from the capitalist West, the continuities outweigh the contrasts. The Soviet model was trapped by the same relations of work and nature. The logic of twentieth-century state communism was stuck in a sixteenth-century ecology. In fact, the Soviets were rather keen on taking all manner of ideas from their capitalist foes, including those of the American time-and-motion expert Frederick Winslow Taylor, which were embraced—and contested—in Soviet industry. Lenin, who had earlier denounced "man's enslavement by the machine" under Taylorism, insisted in April 1918 that "we must definitely speak of the introduction of the Taylor System… Without this, it will be impossible to raise productivity, and without that we will not usher in socialism." […]

Figure 1. William Blake, Europe, Supported by Africa and America, 1796. Source: Stedman 1796, 394. [...]

Capitalism, however, could not survive a day without a third moment of work: the appropriation of human reproductive labor, conducted largely outside the cash nexus [emphasis, me]. The global factory and the global farm each relies on a family, on a community of care. Thus a revolutionary politics of sustainability must recognize—and mobilize through the contradictions of—a tripartite division of work under capitalism: labor power, unpaid care work, and the work of nature as a whole. Worker exploitation is bound together with the appropriation of extrahuman nature and the unpaid work of care [emphasis, me] (ibid.).

Under capital and state models (which the Soviets borrowed from the West to a Cartesian degree, above), nature is monstrous-feminine/a vengeful whore to police out from an ethnocentric past (re: "Nature Is Food"); i.e., into Socialist Realism as much as Capitalist Realism (for more, see: Patel and Moore, footnotes—specifically on Cartesian thought and a 16th century ecology tied to America, Communist China and the USSR). The state cannot allow such things. Ergo, anyone who suggests a freeing of the Gorgon—to pay those "of nature"/see them as human despite their present monstrous-feminine status as worthy of capital punishment—is an unironic "terrorist" who must be, in Bad Empanada's own words, "made taboo again" (source YouTube Community post, Bad Empanada: 2024): he's dancing to Stalin's tune (see: "On Lenin, Stalin...")!

In fact, Bad Empanada's so sure of this position that his saying so is still up (as are his other canards)! He's proud of it, therefore his outdated views as a whole (a kind of military optimism versus whores/war on sex waged out of Antiquity by patriarchal men/weird canonical nerds stuck in the Man Box; re: me vis-à-vis Mark Greene)! He's Stalin's bitch (and Mao's, but we'll get to that)!

(artist, left: Solomon Nelson; right: Persephone van der Waard; cited: "Follow-Up: White Moderates Still Don't Challenge Fascism," 2025)

Despite what Bad Empanada argues, whores can be nerds, thus rebels (straight or not); e.g., Delilah, myself and Rhxbynn and Shipwreck Valaroy are all nerds and activists. Not all nerds are, meaning moderates, white or not; e.g., Bad Empanada, but also Solomon Nelson (above). Unlike them, we rebellious whores fight fire with fire for workers and nature—specifically the fire of the gods living inside us (re: Blake's "heaven in a wildflower" but also Milton's "darkness visible," below); i.e., as something to take back from the very weirdos pimping us out/pooping their pants: whenever we dare show ourselves in public! Class war is ass war, our nudity being all we need to expose our usual predators "on the Aegis" (the proverbial "cure" that "poison" offers, also below)! We don't have to "defeat" you in a YouTube comments section, Bad Empanada; we need only expose you for being weirdos (to hang you with your own rope): only a pimp would say what you say, a sad little incel who despises sexuality to an alien degree, hates the Humanities outright, and clearly doesn't know how to talk to girls (and whose own narcissistic tendencies [of the poetic sort] lead you to think we actually want your approval or are trying to convince you, in this scenario. The world doesn't revolve around you, dickhead).

(artist: Grobi-Grafik)

The paradox of whores is that female/feminine workers are always whores, or those treated as feminine—with TERFs betraying their own brethren (cis or trans) within toxic white feminism (what I call "fascism feminism"; re: "Girl Bosses, Male Gatekeepers, and the Gender-Critical Movement," 2025), but whose triangulation extends simultaneously into racialized spheres; e.g., whose POC men/males called "boy" or "buck" to subjugate them towards imperial models (re: Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks, 1952) but also the "cunning recognition" of minority struggles as something to appease through tokenized representation schemes (re: Coulthard's Red Skin, White Masks, 2014; see: John the Duncan's "The Cunning Recognition of Palestine" [2025] for an expansion of this idea). Any way you slice and/or combine it, slavery is slavery but operates through modular elements (class, culture and race; privilege/oppression) that historically intersect, requiring intersectional solutions while mapping them out, on and offstage (what I call "half-real," borrowing from Juul's ludologies while applying them to anarcho-Communism): the status quo/oppressor's many forms (with tokenism further complicating things; see: side bar "On Tokenism"):

(Prince Shakur's "I Mapped Trump's REAL Base. Here's What I Found..." 2025; timestamp: 30:07)

To it, no matter how virginal or modest we appear, the elite rape by design by recruiting from us, ipso facto, and which we must challenge by forming bonds with people oppressed differently than we are; e.g., Prince Shakur (who isn't token, to be clear—quite the opposite, above); i.e., for workers being arbitrarily "of nature," thus monstrous-feminine—meaning in ways the state (not just capital) historically treats as food per Kristeva's abjection process (re: "Nature Is Food"). The state does so through dialogs of revenge geared towards selective extermination (re: me vis-à-vis Wolfe; see: "Toxic Shlock Syndrome," 2025): always an alien (whore, criminal, terrorist, etc) to pimp, across cycles of generational abuse pitting in-group workers against out-group workers letting some outsiders in. Profit = rape, the whore's revenge challenging profit (the pimp's revenge) by reversing abjection/hugging the alien "on the Aegis" (re: "Rape Reprise"): "We are alien, which becomes something to embrace over time; i.e., reversing abjection to decolonize Hell, hugging the alien to have the whore's revenge against profit" (source: "Replying to Jon Barbas," 2025).

"Under Capitalist Realism, Hell is a place that always appears on Earth," I also write (source: "Scouting the Field," 2023); the same goes for any aforementioned Socialist Realism—with "Socialism" of the Marxist-Leninist sort never meant to be the final staging point, but one that through its own historical failures remains frozen in time. So while modesty is fine as an option, I would not recommend dressing like a nun exclusively to challenge nuclear models (including red nuns; e.g., Lady Izdihar still fetishizing power much like nuns frankly do, below):

(source Instagram post, ladyizdihar: August 27th, 2023)

On Nudity, Cocottes and Red Scare (and Critiquing Soviet Aesthetics during Socialist Realism, feat. Lady Izdihar)

I believe Izdihar is a bisexual Muslim, but my point still stands. Modesty unto itself is not a virtue—at least not one that serves workers universally, insofar as those treated as "vice" personified are historically demonized by the "more modest" among labor as a whole (not that Izdihar is doing that, mind you). Furthermore, sex-as-fetish can be a weapon and armor (or Gorgon/Amazon as I research them); and while it can communicate upon veils (e.g., Segewick's "Imagery of the Surface," 1981)—it can also communicate in the buff (so to speak). Such nudity shouldn't be discounted as a holistic form of rebellion alongside more modest varieties. Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism is holistic, and fights for universal liberation, nude or not; "universal" means freeing whores (scarlet but also green women, further down), letting them speak for themselves in all forms of policed speech. This includes nudity and prostitution, but also modesty arguments ("cocottes") and Red Scare/Socialist Realism more broadly.

First, "Socialist Realism" as I describe it isn't strictly the artistic movement upholding Socialist values and aesthetics (e.g., Shawn Grenier's "An Introduction," above; timestamp: 0:26); it's a Gothic refrain tied to the hauntology (re: canceled future) of state decay per socialist models. Said decay leads historically to myopic results comparable to Mark Fisher's aforementioned Capitalist Realism: an end of the world imagined when faced with the death of Socialism, one with—in the Soviet's case before, during and after the Fall—a suitably radioactive flavor (e.g., Roadside Picnic, Stalker [exhibit 4, below] and the Metro series—1972, 1979 and 2002; see: "All that We're Told" [2018] and "Red Scare: Out in the World"  for further studies from me, combining Gothic and post-Soviet critique). Or, as I define "hypernormality" in my series glossary:

hypernormal/-ity

A term that, according to Adam Curtis' HyperNormalization (2016), was originally used to describe the "whiplash" feelings of Soviet citizens during the 1980s—faced with the terrifying onset of societal collapse despite Soviet national propaganda having adopted neoliberal shock therapy while insisting that things were fine. The same idea can be applied to the uncanny sensation that things are not fine or even real despite how normal, foundational and concrete they seem; i.e., how they "pass" as normal despite a disquieting sense of decay (worker exploitation, for our purposes).

(artist, left: Jill Suzanne Smith; right: Persephone van der Waard)

Furthermore, to be holistic and avoid Red Scare, I levy my critique not only at ML "cocottes" pining for the USSR during Socialist Realism (if the shoe fits, Izdihar), but also Berliners nostalgic for Weimar's doomed interwar period; e.g., Jill Suzanne Smith (above), who I critique for her own myopic (and exclusionary) Berlin Coquette (2013)—specifically for her "bourgeois cocottes" and for valuing "whores that don't look like whores" over visibly monstrous (whore-like) ones; re (from "Joy Under Fascism"):

(exhibit 1: Two different used bookstores, two different partners who bought me books after grad school—with various adventures tied to each; e.g., the Styrofoam containers in the take-out bag [from the second book store, bottom-right] accidentally overturned, spilling their contents into the bag and causing it to leak [and forcing me to throw out the food, much to my chagrin]. Deprived of prandial food thanks to my own absent-mindedness, I fed my mind on the usual "foodstuffs" academics often resort to—a house of leaves! Furthermore, when writing this section, I took my copy of George Mosse's Nationalism and Sexuality [1985] that Jadis bought me, in 2022 [the rightmost book, bottom-left], and combined it alongside my examining of a different book; re: Jill Smith's Berlin Coquette that a newer partner purchased for me, in a completely different city and state, three years later.)

The exact books (and their respective acquisitions) led me to reading a bit while at the hospital, and gave me food for thought about my own work in relation to other workers; e.g., Smith's Berlin Coquette as something to synthesize; i.e., in the aforementioned old-fashioned way of looking at something and going from there; re: from grad school onwards, leasing the approach from my pre-Internet past: as a little girl reading books from the local library in my spare time. Books are brainfood; I see food, I eat it—with people being "food" as much as books (as are all the assorted neo-medieval hyphenations "Gothic" typically affords).

This time, I read Smith's concept of a "whore's ball"; i.e., as advertised by West Berlin media, in 1988, but also her academic desire to view whores in ways that defy common expectations about whores:

"What will the world come to, if we can no longer tell who's a whore and who isn't?' [re: the abjection process]. This book is much like the whore's ball, for it provides its readers with images of prostitutes in Berlin that defy common stereotypes about deviance and destitution. It does so, however, by examining debates on prostitution that took place up to a century before the women of Hydra organized their first ball. […] Some artists and writers who lived and worked in the German capital at the time were able to see beyond dichotomized images of prostitutes and envision them as something other than victims or villains [emphasis, me]. Granted, some of Berlin's most iconic cultural texts serve up visions of female monstrosity and victimization that are impossible to erase from our index […] Without ignoring those images [of Berlin's metropolitan decadence and sexual murder], this book shows that the idea of prostitutes as rational workers and as elegant bourgeois "cocottes" (Kokotten) also surfaced and took hold during this period and give us a far more complex, differentiated picture of gender and sexuality in modern Berlin [emphasis, me]. My work disrupts the dichotomized reading of prostitutes as either victims or agents of destruction reproduced in existing scholarship [re: Creed's The Monstrous-Feminine, 1993], which, much like the taz's article about the Whore's Ball, perpetuates stereotypes of prostitutes and produces narratives laden with judgement that do an injustice to the very context they are describing. Analyses that view prostitution only through the restrictive dual lens of destitution and sexual deviance lead to less nuanced readings of primary sources [emphasis, me] (source: "Introduction" to Berlin Coquette).

And yet in reading it, I suddenly felt personally attacked; i.e., by a fellow academic woman discounting my profession and research areas; re: not just Metroidvania, but the Gothic, monstrous-feminine, ludo-Gothic BDSM and public nudism (exhibiting sex and force)! An explanation eluded me, save that I wanted to lash out at this stuffy German prude: "Bitch, please."

(artist: Caravaggio)

Please note, my critiquing Socialist (specifically Soviet) Realism is not "Red Scare," because the aesthetic isn't the issue; the flow of power is—a fact I defend while critiquing other Communists in good faith. Dress like a red-and-black nun if your praxis moves power away from the state (and Izdihar frankly seems fine, in that respect). Despite me writing this here and elsewhere, though, such disclaimers don't stop people from calling me a "bourgeois pornographer" (top-left, below);

(exhibit 4: source, top-left: the comments to my "Essay No.9"; artist, bottom-left: Shawn Grenier; top-right: Cuwu, from "Red Scare: Out in the World," 2024; bottom-far right: a collage from my "Gothic Communism logo" exhibit [2023] critiquing Laborwave as an artistic movement responding to Vaporwave: "artist, left: Leonardo Galletti; top-right: Eyeliner; bottom-right: Esprit 空想 [Esprit Fantasy]")

i.e., despite me and my friend's work being mutually informed and consensual labor exchanges combing aesthetic and praxis to empower workers at state expense (re: "Illustrating Mutual Consent" from "Paratextual Documents"). We're not "beyond" reproach, of course; we're also trying to move power into worker hands (with Cuwu, again, being an ML and I being an-Com with my own ties to the Soviet Union). To that, I'm happy to engage in tactical unity with MLs like Lady Izdihar in this respect, but "Soviet nun" still isn't my preferred Halloween costume insofar as the marriage of praxis and a "red" aesthetic goes (regardless if naughty nuns are a Gothic staple; e.g., Matilda the crossdressing Satanist/actual Satan from Matthew Lewis' The Monk, 1794). But, as the above exhibit shows, I'm not wholly against the idea, either!

I digress, contending with decay mid-praxis and -aesthetic is an ongoing struggle that "Gothic" more broadly navigates. Furthermore, modesty is historically compelled—a form of selective segregation where women (often religious women—Christian or not, straight or not) hedge their bets by leaning into such things; i.e., to a praxially inert degree, frozen in time (above). A witch hunt is a witch hunt, a whore a whore—one the state fetishizes while pimping workers as much as capital does; i.e., foreign and domestic, during reactive abuse selectively and collectively blaming labor for/pinning the elite's crimes onto (and which we reverse Asprey's terrorist/counterterrorist process, mid-abjection and cryptonymy as wholly dualistic affairs, below): Radcliffe-style, the Black Veil housing an imaginary menace both make-believe and tied to real people the elite constantly triangulate violence towards/regarding. Capital always needs a scapegoat, mid-decay. Again, so does the state, be it openly capitalist or not (and its "spectres of Marx," afterwards)!

(exhibit 98a4 [from "'What is a Witch?' part two," 2025]: Artist: J. Scott Campbell. Witches and goblins are classic symbols of persecution, Elphaba the monstrous-feminine [witchcraft] merged with blood libel and sodomy tropes [the Maguire version, Wicked onwards, is trans; see: "Sexist Ire"]. The Wicked Witch of the West can be a symbol of proletarian revolt, but can just as easily be reduced to a neo-conservative sexpot who gets mired down in incremental, equality-through-convenience disputes—e.g., about public (and scholastic) nudism—instead of actually critiquing power. Just as power and resistance share the same space, the aesthetics of death and power as badass can be employed by bourgeois and proletarian forces in cryptonymic opposition; the context must be gleaned through dialectical-material scrutiny as a matter of "oppression disguise" to worn, in good faith and bad as Witch™ mid-Amazonomachia. Tokens look like the oppressed, green skin or not...)

Alas, segregation is ultimately a form of silence and silence is genocide/death; i.e., whores police whores through the same Gothic terror language that MLs historically abject, which workers more broadly can reclaim (e.g., "Policing the Whore" and "Our Sweet Revenge"). Furthermore, per Gothic models and poetry-as-praxis through sex, drugs and rock 'n roll, cryptonymy and its own duality per dialectical-material dialogs (workers/the state) allow for workers of all stripes and functions to show and hide [a double operation; re: Hogle] during "mere play" (re: Gloggins—what Plato called "shadows," Swift "splendide mendax" and Milton "darkness visible"); i.e., in ways that treat nudity as armor/educational versus something merely to fear and reject as unironically alien, Satanic, what-have-you. "We camp canon because we must," and through camp—specifically what I call ludo-Gothic BDSM—we reclaim our power in all its forms (re: "Interrogating Power through Your Own Camp," 2023)! Flow of power determines function, not aesthetic; use whatever aesthetic you like as long as it (and its campy performative ironies) actively empower workers—meaning in intersectional solidarity and consciousness, therefore tactical unity achieving a pedagogy of the oppressed: healing from rape but also preventing it (thus power abuse) in the future! No exceptions, the state another Omelas to walk away from (towards post-scarcity using pre-capitalist ideas, including whores)! Instead, Hell is our disco (or "danger disco" as I put it; re: "The Quest for Power," 2023)! Don't hate us, heed us; i.e., as human-yet-alien when we reclaim dehumanizing language (of the whore-as-alien): to reclaim the Base and recultivate the Superstructure "on the Aegis" (re: "On Twin Trees")!

(artist: Mugiwara; sticker by Orpheon)

Concerning Marxist-Leninism (versus Gothic [gay-anarcho] Communism; feat. Socialism for All and Chemical Mind)

(source)

While Gothic Communism is a holistic discipline with a dualistic dialectical-material approach (flow of power determines function, not aesthetic), the rest of this document explores the sexist and queerphobic elements of Marxist-Leninism (not the racism, which I explore elsewhere*); i.e., tied to the historical past (e.g., Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin, above) but also Bad Empanada and those who support him, occupying the same dialectical-material spheres; re: "Notes on Lenin, Stalin, and Why Marxist-Leninism Historically Sucks for Women and Queer People." In a word (and borrowed from Marx's Kapital, 1867), the state sucks: "Capital is dead labour, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks" (source: "Limits of the Working-Day"). And what goes for capital also goes for the state (re: "The World Is a Vampire").

*In fascist critiques of popular media—e.g., heavy metal, bodybuilding and videogames—that apply anisotropically to Marxist-Leninism; i.e., MLK's "white moderate" problem not restricted to the United States, and one that includes sexism and queerphobia endemic to revolutionary movements making exceptions, historically: Lenin's dictatorship of the proletariat just a dictatorship, period, and one whose Soviet Omelas ultimately decayed faster than Western capital (not to discredit Socialism, here—merely point out how making deals with fascists and selling out your women and queer folk will historically bite you in the ass, later on).

How, you ask? For one, we're generally considered "not Communists" by MLs—meaning any of that category who apologize for state power to harm care workers (whores or otherwise); i.e., "we" meaning anyone who isn't the common historical subject*: functionally white, straight, paid and male, and in ways that go beyond Descartes' "Society" into more recent revolutionary modes of discourse. From care work to sex work (aka "women's work" but extending into anyone treated "like women" per nuclear models†), said discourse is a false benevolence—one that historically continues to exclude unpaid groups. Pimped "in utero" from cradle to grave, doing so happens inside and concerning the planet as owned by men; i.e., a man's world, specifically a white straight man to emulate by whomever the colonized happen to be (re: Greene's Man Box); i.e., per bastardized Cartesian models seeing those with privilege playing fatherly husband, brother or keeper of some kind or another "for us" while putting us collectively down (the prison-like enforcement of a pecking order).

*Borrowed from John the Duncan's "Woke Is Dead," wherein the Western liberal subject is abstracted to such degrees as to worm its way into Marxist argumentation (timestamp: 15:43); re: that excludes unpaid labor from revolutionary action:

(source: "Part 3: Excluding the Unwaged" from John the Duncan's "Woke Is Dead" [2025]; timestamp: 37:26)

†There's obviously bias to such studies, but also historical-material realities I've previously explored; re (from Volume Three's "Selling Sex," 2025):

(exhibit 87e1: Left: source and model: Glasses GF; right, model: Glasses GF. In Gothic, whores are monsters. Catherine Mackinnon writes, "Sexual objectification is the primary process of the subjection of women. It unites act with word, construction with expression, perception with enforcement, myth with reality. Man fucks woman; subject verb object." However, in "A Gender Analysis of Global Sex Work" from Selling Sex in the City: A Global History of Prostitution, 1600s-2000s, Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk argues, "While most of the chapters do not provide much information about male or transgender/transvestite sex work (and in most historical [legal] contexts prostitution has been defined as "female"), some countries such as China and the Ottoman Empire had a rich tradition of prostitution by men or boys."

In other words, much of sex work is historically AFAB since ancient times but includes AMABs [and intersex people] from as far back who are treated in a traditionally feminine sense under the current colonial model [...]

For instance, Socialism for All recently said to his audience, "I wasn't even a Communist, at that point; I was more of an an-Com" ("21st Century Capitalist Crisis," 2025; timestamp: 2:33). Ignoring the reduction of that statement omitting anarchism from so-called "real Communism" (and the fact that Marx was an anarchist), SoA espouses organizing as being what workers need (and ironically says afterwards, "go read Marx' stuff from 1850," more or less). Perhaps he should change his name to Socialism for Some (as I basically tell him, below)?

"Nerd" and "pussy slayer" aren't mutually exclusive, then, but sometimes I wonder with MLs; i.e., you can't just "be right," but need to likeable, too—meaning if you actually wanna relate to others/convince them in meaningfully lasting ways (sexual, yes, but also asexual, too; re: "Crash Course: An Introduction to Asexuality and Demisexuality," 2025). Again, the material and social intertwine, often to psychosexual degrees (or discussions about/metaphors concerning sex; i.e., as something to cryptonymically regulate/rebel with, below).

Also, I'm not just talking about families/the nuclear model; i.e., you can have kids and still be bad in bed/a bad partner who endorses the state through "homewrecker" fears (the jury still out on Marx, in that respect). The fact remains, anyone who excludes women and queer folk from the larger revolutionary process (as MLs historically do) is a servant/pimp of the ruling class, ipso facto. To that, MLs tend to frame an-Coms as "utopian" or "hedonist," even "degenerate"; i.e., while putting their own faith (and praxis) into a group of exclusionary figures that tended to pimp nature (and those of it); re: as things to exploit for the proletariat (re: paid factory labor but also paid labor period under Marx, onwards): as dependent on that de facto arrangement, such people framing "pure" material analysis as "the end-all, be-all" while also saying how "propaganda will only get you so far"; e.g., Non Compete's "How Hollywood Makes Corporate Propaganda" (2025), to which I respond

Me: Social and material conditions go hand-in-hand. Putting too much reliance on social factors alone might lead to utopian thinking. However, the inverse—of putting all one's eggs into [the basket of] material change without considering the social factors (e.g., racism is extant)—is equally problematic and leads to its own issues. The two must be married, not divorced (source YouTube community post, Persephone van der Waard: November 11th, 2025).

and they thoughtfully reply to in their own comments section:

Non Compete: Yep, this is an interesting and important point! According to historical-materialist theory, the economic base determines the superstructure and the superstructure can impact back on the base. This leads a lot of people to believe the superstructure doesn't matter which leads to deviations like class reductionism. In fact, the superstructure is very important in terms of bringing about revolution, because revolution can only occur through class revolution which requires the development of class consciousness, revolutionary ideology and corresponding revolutionary institutions. And things like racism are huge barriers to those efforts intentionally propped up by the ruling class. So while it's important to understand the objective role of the economic base in determining the superstructure, it's just as important to understand the vital role of superstructural revolutionary action to bring about the inevitable changes to the base as quickly and efficiently as we can as revolutionists.

Weapons—be they violence, terror and/or monsters—aren't monopolized by workers or capital/the state (re: "The State: It's Key Tools" from "Paratextual (Gothic) Documents"). No need to tie one hand behind our own backs, then! Just pick one and run with it; they're two sides of the same coin, after all, and white straight guys (and token folk acting like white straight guys) really need to share the power they historically refuse to let go of. Material shapes consciousness, but consciousness maintains material conditions; re: from Marx to us (above), meaning victims of abuse that he and Engels but also their heteronormative* followers either perpetrated and/or overlooked: spectres of the Medusa, meaning a Communist Numinous that predates the counterfeit sovereignty of old dead white guys (e.g., Mary Shelley and Frankenstein being some of the very "spectres" that Marx—born the year Shelley's novel released—borrowed liberally from; re: "Making Demons").

*Meaning pro-nuclear-model and something that we care workers—housewives and "homewreckers" alike—must camp by "Making Marx Gay."

(artist: Bernie Wrightson)

Like King Pygmalion pimping Galatea, Cartesian men fear and pimp nature per a ghost of the counterfeit (re: Hogle, footnotes). As I've stated repeatedly in my work (e.g., "Twin Trees" and "Preface," 2024), I prefer to focus holistically on the social aspect in relation to the material; i.e., tied to the alien reversing abjection to a collective, intersectional degree per the Gothic mode. However, doing so doesn't preclude a material critique from us or allies. Why would it? Furthermore, if MLs want to focus on Marx and material analysis, that's perfectly fine (the devil you know 'n all that)! But to entirely exclude, omit or otherwise devalue as "secondary" the Superstructure and social aspects of revolution (sex or otherwise)? That's to pimp nature as MLs historically have done; re: for the sake of productivity and "necessary" dictatorships argued for by Lenin and his followers into the present: as paid laborers dependent on unpaid sex and care, the latter bullied by the former and romancing their abuse with impunity!

Per the Gothic, such romances go both ways/are anisotropic; ignore ours at your own peril (e.g., the female avenger's "castration fantasy" being quite common for a reason)! While Mother Nature and climate change* don't discriminate, neither does the Capitalocene or fascism tied to state decay (not just capital, Dutt; re: Fascism & Social Revolution, 1935)! State shift aside, we aliens of capital and the state camp canon to survive fascism under both; i.e., by reuniting those sorry loners who fear unpaid, queer and/or non-white labor with what capital and fascism has made alien in their eyes, mid-abjection. Abjection isn't permanent, so "When the Man comes around, show him your Aegis!" (within reason). Nudity = praxis like anything else; i.e., not "mere aesthetics" or "pure social behaviors" divorced from material critique, but something that combats through fetish and talisman tied to theory and socio-material (therefore political-economic) action: that which the state normally controls/compels—sex and force, but also nature more broadly as something for workers to poetically convey during liberation; re: "on the Aegis" (e.g., by trans man like I-Nocturne, below). To it, whores (or those treated like whores) are no stranger to material analysis; they're living it, moment-to-waking-moment, under fascism:

*State shift, as Patel and Moore describe it.

(artist: I-Nocturne)

Fascism is rape apologia per state models pimping nature and ignoring the consequences once decay sets in—something not unique to Hitler and the West, but also the Capitalocene under Socialist Realism. Lenin, in particular, argued patriarchally for the continuation of state powers ("Socialism under one state"); i.e., certain saviors under Weber's Protestant ethic (1904), itself disguised as "atheism" (under Stalin) while pimping others to compete homosocially with Western rivals (which gentrify and decay for those very reasons). It's white saviorism—the dishonest, Pygmalion kind that frame such processes (and their awful partitions) either as "benevolent" or "vital," neither of which is strictly true and both which account for extended rape apologia; i.e., by MLs historically excluding those out-groups "of nature" by silencing them and rescinding their rights, love-bombing-style (we'll get to that); re: the very people that Bad Empanada and his defenders police to Puritanical degrees under a Protestant ethic (and usually mid-DARVO, below)

(source YouTube community post, Persephone van der Waard: November 7th, 2025)

but also people like Socialism for All, who put all their eggs "into one basket." Material critique will only get you so far, too, my dudes; the whores and aliens of the world must be heeded, lest the state chew them up for "necessary productivity" outside the profit motive (and the planet chew MLs up when she's had enough; re: "Nature Is Food"). Exploitation is exploitation, and climate change—something nation-states historically don't combat (we'll get to that, too)—is just as much a social issue when productivity for its own sake overlooks the consequences of said exploitation: Medusa having her revenge, when push comes to shove (the chickens coming home to roost, sooner or later)!

From Marx to Stalin to Bad Empanada, pimps speak for whores while abusing them, and that undoubtedly has consequences. That being said, I still think Marx has his moments; i.e., to rescue from himself (and absorb into Gothic Communism). I also prefer to focus on those he and his followers dogmatically excluded; i.e., my focus being on a stewardship of nature that doesn't cheapen or otherwise take it for granted (a radicalization I picked up from Bay and my non-white friends). This includes our whore's collective ability to organize for socio-material reasons: the lot of us dialectically-materially addressing the widespread generational harm state models cause; i.e., the ability to organize isn't "unique" to MLs and their Cartesian forebears—not just Descartes or the mad science that Shelley warned about per the Cartesian Revolution, but other state apologists under the same ethic (whose "16th century ecology" the Soviets and Chinese also borrowed from, drinking from Marx' poisoned chalice; e.g., Hobbes and Leviathan [1651], below): an embarrassment for them to conveniently bastardize and ignore in equal measure!

(artist: Magasin Pittoresque; cited: Paul Krause's "The Leviathan of Thomas Hobbes, Part II: Of Man, Knowledge, and 'Science,'" 2020)

Furthermore, the Marx-and-Lenin crowd historically have suffered a bit of a "dryness" problem; i.e., being dull-as-dust while being exclusionary towards women, queer folk and unpaid* labor for centuries. This means in ways that me and my friends embody solutions to, arguing "sex work is work" through Gothic Communism; i.e., as a whole—we "undead," "demonic" and "animalistic" laborers facing the very kinds of sexism, whorephobia and pimping I've just described: the elite endlessly chattelizing whores for profit and productivity during capital/state (re)birth and death. How we challenge that is up to us, not the people who—as the "universal class subjects" deciding what is and isn't revolutionary to a Protestant degree (re: Duncan)—are all-too-quick to delegitimize; i.e., discarding what we do in favor of "pure material critiques" (class reductionism).

*John the Duncan points this out in their "Woke Is Dead" video's "excluding the unwaged" section (Persephone van der Waard's "A Gothic Researcher/Author/Sex Worker/Activist Responds to 'Woke Is Dead' feat. ‪@JohntheDuncan, 2025"; timestamp: 1:39:55), only to omit sex workers from the conversation (ibid.; timestamp: 2:18:02). As Patel and Moore astutely point out, care work is historically unpaid, undervalued and overexploited under capital and systems of different nominalities[2]; I extend this to—or rather focus on—sex work as something to fight for while doing it (re: my "Hailing Hellions Q&A" series interviewing sex workers of different marginalities[3]).

(artist: Nyx)

As I wrote earlier in response to Bad Empanada's own nerdy dogma: "I digress; the entire thing could be written in crayon on toilet paper and you'd still be a hateful bigot hiding behind his own 'academic' veneer (and my slutty/nerdy assemblage just as correct)." The same goes for my friends and I camping and critiquing Marx, Engels, Lenin, Mao, who-the-fuck-ever using what we got; re: "on the Aegis" with the Aegis, "terror the kissing cousin of force" using the Medusa's "terrifying powers" (as Asprey and Creed put it): ours to levy at those mistreating us, men like Marx (and especially Lenin) pimping us; i.e., like infants or demons while "harvesting Hell." These men were not infallible gods, and their own bigotries poisoned their work into the present; i.e., as darlings to kill in ways that expand "productivity" beyond the self-same pimping of nature and those "of it" by so-called "thinking beings."

Beyond the Enlightenment, it's a crime that Marxism and especially Marxist-Leninism has committed from the start (and similar state apologia; e.g., Western Liberalism and fascism). Abjection must reverse, which requires heeding the Gorgon "when in Rome." Learn to speak our language, for once! Class war is ass war and ties to land back through sex back; i.e., you keep choking us and Medusa's gonna take your toys away for good (re: state shift)! The state—from Rome to America (and its imitators) to Russian "czars" before/after the Soviets and all their tragically doomed spectres and apologia (the ghost of "Rome," below)—must collectively die lest we (whores and pimps) go down with the ship!

(artist: Thomas Cole)

In response to abjection being furthered by our enemies pimping us (and nature as a whole), "assemblage" is the key word, here (and sex and force, above and below); i.e., I drafted Gothic Communism to critique the usual pimping of nature, and which my friends and I fight against, fire-with-Promethean-fire; re (from my book series abstract):

(artist: Romantic Rose)

to combat nation-states as the ultimate foe, Gothic Communism's chief aim is to be campier (thus sexier and funnier) than Marx; i.e., camping his ghost to develop a holistically intuitive anarcho-Communism begot through a widespread, collective and solidarized emotional and Gothic intelligence/awareness that recultivates the Superstructure and reclaims the Base through intersectional resistance and de facto (extracurricular) reeducation: the Wisdom of the Ancients, or cultural understanding of the imaginary past, endemic to this organizational process, and not one any particular group can monopolize (through violence, terror and monsters, etc).

Simply put, Gothic has that mood, that cool factor to do the trick; i.e., by subverting monstrous language, which normally dehumanizes workers and nature through popular stories furthering abjection (us versus them): to suitably humanize the harvest, which capital (and its Realism) can only pimp out when vengefully raping nature as monstrous-feminine whore [re: me vis-à-vis Creed; see: "Nature Is Food"]. The whore's revenge against profit, then [re: profit = rape per state models, not just capital; see: "Rape Reprise"], is to fuck back on the same Aegis; i.e., when the Man comes around, show him your Aegis. When done correctly, its paradoxical, cryptonymic exposure will set you free (re: silence is genocide), but reversing abjection must happen together as one—per intersectional solidarity healing from rape through a shared pedagogy of the oppressed: walking away from Omelas and towards post-scarcity while becoming better stewards of nature than historically have ever existed (assimilation is poor stewardship)! Medusa demonstrates there is power in what they try to control; take it back by using it in ways they can't steal from you! Become the Gorgon! (source: "Abstract" from "Gothic Communism" promo page; written 2023, updated 2025).

From Matthew Lewis to me, Gothic is silly-serious anchored to reclaimed "demonic" language; i.e., the state rapes nature by design, those state-assigned aliens healing from rape (and its dogmatic effects) by playing with "rape": through calculated risk as teaching device; re: ludo-Gothic BDSM cryptonymically reversing abjection during the whore's revenge; e.g.,

However messy it appears, trashy it feels or loud it sounds, then, the language of the imaginary past speaks volumes to the sins of empire and operations of capital [...] Alien torture promotes sweet release from capital's Numinous torment, but only when domination becomes playful, thus ironic, to end profit (source: "Rape Reprise").

and

Ludo-Gothic BDSM is typically silly-serious, in this respect—putting "rape" in quotes through playful, thus goofy and regressive psychosexual theatre that, often
enough, can get hella rough (ibid.).

(artist: Frank Frazetta)

Regardless, state powers will take one look at us and think we're nuts; e.g., Cuwu and I a couple of "complete loons" while healing from rape (our previous actions inspiring what, in turn, eventually became a book chapter bearing the same name, below). And fair enough, exploitation and liberation share the same half-real stages; i.e., that fascism and Communism (ergo MLs and an-Coms) do, in and out of fiction; e.g., Frank Frazetta's own "monster kayfabe" (above) mirrored cryptomimetically by my and Cuwu's calculated risk, during ludo Gothic BDSM—the two of us enjoying stories like Frazetta's while bumping uglies: one ML to one an-Com, the two of us playing with the same Gothic "soup" that Marx did (and which less "picky" eaters currently do, besides)! Nude or no, these labor forms remain useful to rebellion; i.e., to reclaim and use through their value as code, said value owing to their historical-material alienation by capital and the state, which we can harness (reclaim) and control:

(artist: Persephone van der Waard and Cuwu; cited: "Healing from Rape")

To that, outward confusion (and rejection by pimps we want to expose) is the point—a cunning means of camouflage and code when you're not sure who's good-faith or not. Under constant surveillance, we whores play at sex and war (re: "rape") behind different buffers; i.e., using our phones and computers to pass vital data along—meaning behind their screens while healing from state abuse all the while; re (from Volume Three):

These buffers apply to revolutionary praxis as a kind of "aegis" to keep us safe [...] but also to speak out against our oppressors with in exhibitionist ways. They reverse abjection but also work as defensive cryptonyms that get at trauma protectively—i.e., through voyeurism and exhibitionist as a sex-positive practice: "Art is love made public," with the act of looking non-shameful and appreciative, not persecutory (source: "Transgressive Nudism," 2025);

Inexorable messiness aside, doing so ideally happens in operative ways; i.e., that use play to covertly describe those praxial realities that Marxist-Leninism historically rejects: that sex is silly at times but also weaponry used by strange bedfellows "in the same boat." To that, Marx was a famous Gothicist for whores to spoof away from dogma (and fascist actors). By outraging our enemies to demask them during paradoxical exposure, we show them the anarchy Marx himself unleashed through his campy survivors: making Marxism more "moist" than is classically practiced by the usual snobs!

(artist: Persephone van der Waard and Cuwu)

Except, doing so isn't a weakness, nor does it preclude material change; it's a taught communication strategy used by care workers under state crisis, therefore duress—to convey important demonstrations, mid-silliness (therefore fun): through preferential (and performative) code while dodging state censors and pimps, mid-cryptonymy (the code sometimes being cum, above). In short, we're "just having fun," ludo-Gothic BDSM a kind of "brothel espionage" that paradoxically fools our enemies and gets our point across; re (from Volume Zero's "The Finale," 2023):

Beyond videogames, the same idea of competing communication goals applies to other forms of violent (usually Gothic) theatre and gender performance that videogames are built upon (and vice versa); i.e., in relation to parallel media forms and consumption. / By extension, these performances (and their goals) happen in-text, as well as during the meta of the text as something to perform on various registers in ways that can be reclaimed—i.e., not just by cis-het people [...] but by any minority/underclass group who doesn't want to be colonized/tone-policed according to intersecting degrees of privilege and oppression. Ludo-Gothic BDSM can camp canon solo; it can also do it with friends/toys helping us make art: a mystery to reunite with through a process that's difficult to standardize.

(artist: Blxxd Bunny)

In turn, Castricano argues how cryptomimesis is the echo of Marx' proverbial "spectres," the latter of which crop up all over the place; i.e., as "mere garbage" for our enemies to ignore while we make fools of them/have fun at their expense.

Spinal Tap's "Sex Farm" (1984) teases such nuptials, for example—of sex and force, but also land, labor and rebellion—through seemingly "stupid" rock 'n roll camp: "trying to raise some hard love!" It's deliberately goofy. And frankly why the hell not? Faced with the dreadfully dull (and pimp-like) qualities of state apologia/the infuriatingly smug functional pimps that many MLs are, me and my friends' ostensibly "empty" work aims to have fun while dodging the bull (and building a better world, in the process). In doing so, Gothic Communism is neither "mere play" nor that mythically "magical" stuff of unicorns (e.g., Blxxd Bunny and I using such play while hammering out ludo-Gothic BDSM, above). Nor is it "utopian*" as MLs faithfully posit (re: exhibiting Weber's Protestant ethic "in disguise").

*For one, focusing as much on dystopian historical-material realities and rhetoric; i.e., what Mark Fisher (the minter of Capitalist Realism) would call "canceled futures" (a concept that applies just as well to Marxist-Leninism and Socialist Realism, and which is generally canceled in drug-like ways tied to Marx; re: me vis-à-vis Fisher and Stuart Mills' "What Is Acid Communism?" [2019]; see: "Call of the Wild" for a lengthy socio-sexual-material exploration of this idea—one that considers Indigenous elements and sex ed alongside queer struggles per an-Com models versus the state). Also, I've critiqued actual utopian thinkers (and Gothic abstainers forgetting that people historically-materially love whores/the language they use to love them, "when in "Rome"); e.g., Samuel Coleridge Taylor from older times and Fredric Jameson more recently being more darlings to kill; i.e., by camping their ghosts, similar to Marx:

(exhibit 5: Artist, left: Washington Allston; top-center-left and bottom-center-left: Krispy Tofuuu; top-right: right: Passion Peachy; bottom-left: Persephone van der Waard. Various exhibits critiquing Gothic snobs/abstinence tied to de-facto-to-outspoken utopian thinking; re [from the Demon Module]:

Beyond just dead malls, then, I want to examine the larger creative space as liminal; i.e., both as haunted, but also criticized by those who won't eat green eggs and ham: critics of the Gothic mode who turn their noses up at its sexualized cryptonymies and monstrous, supernatural language; e.g., Fredric Jameson* but also Coleridge. Never trust a skinny cook, but also any fiction snob who's allergic to monsters and liminality but still bothers to write academic volumes about goddamn spaceships. Not only is denying monstrous expression to deny the humanity of those interrogating it—i.e., the pedagogy of the oppressed—but it occurs in the covert nature of human language that moderates demonstrate so well (and makes them more dangerous than overt reactionaries—a fact we will examine thoroughly in Volume Three) [source: "The Future Is a Dead Mall," 2025].

*Re: "that boring and exhausted paradigm," quoted frequently in many sources; e.g., Alex Link's "The Mysteries of Postmodernism, or, Fredric Jameson's Gothic Plots" (2009):

In the midst, of its definitive arguments, Frederic Jameson's Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) pauses to consider the Gothic just long enough to single it out as a hopelessly "boring and exhausted paradigm." The Gothic, he declares, is a mere "class fantasy (or nightmare) in which the dialectic of privilege and shelter is exercised" and it should not be mistaken for a "protofeminist denunciation of patriarchy" nor "a protopolitical protest against rape" [source].)

(source: LoveSudo.com)

Instead, it took steady organization to achieve—communication, but also years of planning between over seventy sex workers, artists and academics (re: "Acknowledgements," 2024). Not to mention, it also took funding and security through my website to install and advertise, the aim being to systemically change material conditions through informed social critique/exchange (and which my security specialist—Josey Howarth, above—specializes in: helping vulnerable workers find protection from political violence, Sense8-style; re: "My Site Security: Reviewing and Recommending Josey Howarth and Love Sudo," 2025):

(ibid.)

Regardless, those condemning such things as "utopian" generally have no earthly idea how sex work actually operates; i.e., seeing all of it as "mere delusion" through so-called "hysteria" arguments (dressed up by men of reason, from the 16th century onwards). In short, an-Com workers can organize, too, and whores are workers—the oldest form of workers, in fact; i.e., the "spectre haunting Europe" not being "of Marx," as Derrida argued in 1993, but "of Mary Shelley," as I argued in 2025: having published Frankenstein in 1818, the year Marx was born (re: "Making Demons"). The state is historically white, male and straight (re: "Understanding Vampires"), the terrible idea—that women and/or sex workers more broadly "need" a straight (white) man to think for us—being one of Marxist-Leninism's biggest myths (and things it tries to revise regarding Soviet censorship and genocide*, afterwards). A dictator is a pimp, and one Marx and Engels didn't fully push for like Lenin—a bit of a bloodthirsty cunt, pushing for dictatorship later in their name—but for which our legitimacy was previously "decided" by them when it should have been by us; re (from "Making Marx Gay"):

*Nothing is more censored than sex, the silence of speech surrounding sex—and its abuse through state models enforcing silence—a form of genocide.

Even so, Engels—despite calling sodomy "abominable" in "Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State" (1883) and lacking the ability to distinguish harmful forms from non-harmful forms—tries in the same essay to imagine a world beyond his own that speaks to our goals:

What we can now conjecture about the way in which sexual relations will be ordered after the impending overthrow of capitalist
production is mainly of a negative character, limited for the most part to what will disappear. But what will there be new? That will be answered when a new generation has grown up: a generation of men who never in their lives have known what it is to buy a woman's surrender with money or any other social instrument of power; a generation of women who have never known what it is to give themselves to a man from any other considerations than real love or to refuse to give themselves to their lover from fear of the economic consequences. When these people are in the world, they will care precious little what anybody today thinks they ought to do; they will make their own practice and their corresponding public opinion of their practice of each individual—and that will be the end of it (source).

In response, Sherry Wolf writes in "The Myth of Marxist Homophobia,"

While here Engels is explicit about how heterosexual relations would undoubtedly be transformed by a socialist revolution, his broader point is that by removing the material obstacles to sexual freedom the ideological barriers can fall. This raises far-reaching possibilities for a genuine sexual revolution on all fronts (source).

(artist: Mugiwara Art)

Again, I am inclined to agree, but want to critique Engels a bit more than Wolf does. The people he's discussing aren't those born into a world where Capitalism simply "doesn't exist" when the person is born. To posit that is to kick the can down the road and shrug one's shoulders. Instead, the current generation must try to imagine a better future while developing Communism in the bargain. To that, hearts, minds and bodies can change while people are alive, and the trick, I would argue, is through Gothic poetics; I was in the closet once and have needed to work hard while alive to become a better, more authentic person. It's certainly far too late to rescue Marx and Engels the historical figures from the embarrassing grave they admittedly dug for themselves, but we can transform their spectres as living entities inside society and ourselves. Take what is useful and leave the rest. Marx will understand. And if he doesn't, to Hell with him!

(model and artist: Blxxd Bunny and Persephone van der Waard)

We whores and/or fags know how to organize (e.g., logos and negotiated labor exchanges, above) and don't need state-sponsored pimps for that (re: "The Basics of Oppositional Synthesis," 2025; see: my entire manifesto, aka Manifesto and Instruction, 2024). And while tactical unity is a thing—and I'll take certain MLs over, say, open fascists or American liberals, "progressives" and Soc-Dems (e.g., Non-Compete and Luna Oi are pretty great)—the fact remains we still have our disagreements; e.g., all dictators are bad, and anarchy (the horizonal distribution of power) is infinitely preferable for queer people and women than the usual betraying of these groups by men like Lenin and Stalin, after Marx died. To it, Marxism and Marxist-Leninism are historically sexist and queerphobic; they're also technologically outdated—having existed before the Internet, which isn't exclusively corporate (e.g., EposVox' "THE NET IS HEALING - Beginners Guide to Mastodon & Fediverse," 2022). The epicenter of transformation is, as always, centered among workers, not just paid, male and/or straight Marxist-Leninists aiming state cannons (or rhetoric) at the usual whores they pimp: "While they're in prayer?" / "The best time!" ("Peter the Great ( TV Series - Part 3)"; timestamp: 14:32). Luckily for us, porn is praxis, class war ass war married to culture and race mid-cryptonymy reversing abjection (sexual guerrillas) hugging the alien!

(artists: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard)

We'll get to some of that, here (and for broader dialogs on how Capitalism sexualizes everything, refer to my PhD; re: "Thesis Statement," 2023). For now, remember this essay articulates Bad Empanada's Marxist-Leninist tendencies, therefore his "Stalinist" (fascistically queerphobic) apologia among MLs alienated from sex; re: why I prefer anarcho-Communism despite having dated a ML, myself (Cuwu was an ML, above; see: "I'm a Rape Survivor" section); i.e., ultimately formulating Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism in response to Marxist-Leninism's historically queerphobic, sexist, and environmentally destructive tendencies. The Soviets might not have been "as bad as the West" as some MLs like to point out—e.g., Chemical Mind's "A History of Queer Rights Under Socialist States" (2023)—but that's easy for them to say when they're ostensibly not gay, women or whores!

(source YouTube Community post, Chemical Mind; cited: Persephone van der Waard's "React No.28: Bad Empanada Calls for Political Violence Against Critic Calling Him Fascist," 2025)

Women and queer folk can betray the cause, too; re: "Regarding Tokenism and Fighting It" (2025). Concerning Chemical Mind and myself, it's not like either of us is unbiased, here—with me having written (and drawn) a non-profit, six-book series on anarcho-Communism (re: Gothic Communism) and Chemical Mind having his own (relatively small, 128-page) book on the Soviet Union, "People from Another World - A Reappraisal of the USSR" (2025)—but he's the one "handing it to a fascist weirdo like Bad Empanada" (as I say in my react video, above). Apologizing for state harm of any kind is rape apologia, because the state—a form of capital—rapes by design. It did so under Stalin, Mao, and the American presidents of the time; it did and does, before and after WWII! As we'll see with Marx and Lenin but also Bad Empanada, calling dictators "necessary" isn't just a fatal flaw in Marxist-Leninism; it's deeply regressive, even fascist insofar as women and queer people go: (some) MLs are kind of incel-y at times—straight or not, male or not!

The same goes for Marx and Engels. They weren't just queerphobic, but sexist, too; i.e., when trying to control sexuality through broader discourse (e.g., "Working Men of All Countries, Unite!" 1844). While they would get better about the sexism—re: Engels speaking to "a generation of women who have never known what it is to give themselves to a man from any other considerations than real love" in "Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State" (1883)—their homophobia never went away (re: "Making Marx Gay"). Furthermore, the rights of women were eventually negatively impacted by the Soviet Union, too; i.e., rescinding its own feminist, liberatory policies after WWII (re: Red Pen's "Women at War: Communism," 2025)—so much so that my own mother (a scholar of Eastern European studies with a focus on the USSR, below) walked away from her studies with a profoundly negative opinion of the Soviets and their treatment of women, but also queer people (read: her daughter)! She was not a fan of Stalin (nor did she like the CIA, before anyone asks); re (from "It Began with a Whisper"):

(source image: A Polaroid taken of my mother when she was younger, shortly after the Fall of the Soviet Union; i.e., circa. 1991, while hanging with the Red Army. Mom's incredibly educated, but one whose streetwise past ensures that she always has a trick [or two] up her sleeve! She also gave me a room of one's own, in essence funding entire my book series.)

Unable to account for the sins of their own dictators, accountability is alien to many MLs—a fact that shall become readily apparent when examining Bad Empanada and his ilk. Before we look at Bad Empanada, though, let's quickly consider those he harms when they absorb his ideas—not Gen X or millennials, even, but queer Gen Z and Alpha being transphobic through Bad Empanada's toxic, exclusionary brand of Marxist-Leninism!

"Suffer the Little Children": Marxist-Leninist Transphobia among Token Gen-Zers and Alphas (side bar)

(exhibit 35a [from "The Imperial Boomerang, part one," 2024]: Top: photos of Khmer prison camp victims, source; bottom: "Meo Soknen, 13, stands inside a small shrine full of human bones and skulls, all victims of the Khmer Rouge. The small shrine, located 27 kilometers south of Phnom Penh, is one of many out-of-the-way-and-forgotten monuments to the 'Killing Fields,'" source. The price of xenophobia is a refusal to love the "zombie," the state fulfilling the prophecy of apocalypse within killing fields by littering them with the bones of the uncountable state's victims: dirt farming for skeletons.)

Capital and state power historically alienate workers to pimp nature as monstrous-feminine, including queer folk. They also recruit from younger queer bodies to do so ("policing the kindergarten," in other words); i.e., Aristotle's "give me a boy until he is seven and I will show you the man"; e.g., like the Khmer Rogue did, weaponizing children to kill adults during Pol Pot's auto-genocidal "Zero Year" (above). To it, no one is immune to propaganda, pro-state or otherwise (re: no monopolies, insofar as praxis is anisotropic and dualistic). Furthermore, both older and younger revolutionaries remain historically-materially out of touch in ways pro-labor activists must holistically reverse, "on the Aegis." Said reversal cannot occur without examining the problem at its core/site of toxicity and transference, meaning from one generation to the next. Beyond millennials and Gen X furthering abjection, I also have examples of Marxist-Leninist transphobia from the current Tumblr side of things; i.e., from the younger Gen Z and Alpha crowd (assembled with the help of a comrade, alias "Rain Frog"):

Note: The point in sharing these ostensibly "quaint" snippets lies in how social and material conditions go hand-in-hand, as do technology and discourse overall: through a queer mode thereof married to older dialectical-material theories that—rather than simply die or fade into obscurity—merge and evolve into new disastrous forms; re: Marx' "tradition of all dead generations" [source: Marx' "Eighteenth Brumaire," 1852] made gay and embarrassingly bourgeois, to boot; i.e., favoring state power through marginalized in-fighting among the current-to-next generations of gay youngsters, tragically influenced by old dead straight guys (and living chicken hawks) celebrating state models that frame non-token queerness as "unproductive" (aka "useless eaters" in outright fascist terms). Think "this is your brain on fascism," except fascism goes beyond what Dutt or Eco (1935 and 1995) ever though possible ("wild shit, in Rain Frog's words, below):

Rain Frog: Yeah I've been dealing with the intracommunity stuff ( but it's more discussions and preventing radicalizations at this point things kinda suck rn in certain spaces). I do not envy you taking on the moderates at all. …It's mainly the MLs tbh dhsjhdjsjdhdsidhs they're telling all the trans guys to kill themselves. It's some wild shit.

Me: woof / been expanding on this a bunch

Rain Frog: They’re also trying to detrans us and don't know actual material conditions of different groups. Idk point is I’m very fascinated by the entire thing and so I’m mainly just talking about and boosting one another’s issues. While also ignoring the MLs screaming in the background that trans guys should die.

Nice [replying to me]! Idk MLs have always just hurt my head

Me: right? they act all enlightened about queer rights... while having no queer friends (or normal friends, tbh)

Rain Frog: Yeah and some of them are incredibly popular for the platform and so it just spreads and some people are swooped up in the pseudo intellectualism and the people with the actual lived experiences are going "what the actual fuck" and it breeds animosity where there shouldn't be any

Me: Ideally not, yeah. A lot of older sodomy fears from Marx onwards. He and Engels used to call queer people not just sodomites, but also Uranians. Are there any examples of MLs acting this way I could cite? I'd leave your name out of it. I'm just curious of some examples of ML transphobia more broadly

Rain Frog: I have most of them blocked, but I'll see!

Rain Frog: Unfortunately ml is also an abbreviation for miraculous ladybug lmaoooo gonna try and go about this in an alternate way and url search some of the people in my #extreme evidence tag: my personal tag for if I see somebody suicide baiting or suggesting detransition of somebody else ( obviously not going after kinksters, just people who are using it as a weird form of praxis to punch at trans guys ) and see if they are still around if not I'll ask around since it was a few friends that pointed out "hey isn't it weird that a lot of the people doing this are MLs"
Effective strategy!

https://www.tumblr.com/molsno/789112938227236864/you-can-go-to-any-transandrocuntboys-blog-and-not

https://www.tumblr.com/molsno/799666379580162048/i-already-dont-like-drag-but-the-fact-that

https://www.tumblr.com/luxiomahariel/799796109827604480

ml in bio and frequently talked about topic, find a few more people more because this is a concerning pattern of really odd radicalization against trans men spear headed by a lot of radical transfeminists who are also mls (which is one hell of a statement that makes me feel a bit crazy and is why I block frequently and log instances I see on the more extreme side and then can dive in more if needed like rn)

Also transandrocuntboy (what I highlighted) is a very derogatory version of the existing insult transandrobro (anybody who believes in, talks about, or theorizes around transandrophobia/transmasc oppression usually regardless of the specific word used):

(exhibit 6: Source, left: further examples from Rain Frog on the ML, Tumblr-specific insult "transandrobro." Though maybe it appears, elsewhere? Transmisandry certainly does, as do words similar to it that are used by queer folk to divide themselves as much as not; e.g., "trans emasculation" being a word that isn't universally upon, definition or usage; re [from the footnotes to "The Chickens Come Home to Roost: Transphobe Bad Empanada Goes Mask-Off"]:

Niche terms describing niche bigotry and oppression can often be disagreed upon; i.e., I don't tend to use "trans emasculation," myself, preferring Barbara Creed's monstrous-feminine—one being a niche academic term from the '90s, the other being grassroots and more recent. But sometimes I use transemasculation because not everyone's a Gothicist. Yet, I do so as a trans woman, not a trans man, wherein the latter may disagree with me using the term, period; e.g., for "trans men erasure" (or so the argument goes). In other words, marginalized in-fighting is a thing (criminogenic conditions) and trans people can be really bitter towards one another in ways that disarm rebellion (re: praxial inertia); i.e., while getting down in the weeds to a toxic, unproductive degree. It's not healthy to have one's entire identity built around mistrusting others, especially comrades in the same zone of oppression (trans people, men or women).

Case in point, while writing this piece, someone responded pretty gruffly about my usage of the term. While their accusations and criticism were fair up to a point—and I'm sharing the elements I thought were fair—any language of the oppressed is, unto itself, something to categorize and police by different parties who disagree on smaller points; i.e., while pushing holistically towards the same larger goal (universal liberation, through tactical unity):

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

Note (9/5/2025): This essay was given to me by someone—a trans man, specifically—who took offense with my usage of the word "trans emasculation"; i.e., a term I was citing after having been given the link by a trans man (my best friend and fellow activist—Ginger, above). The writer of this piece took the time to write a response to why I was wrong, and given how hard they appear to have worked on it—and how important it is to educate others on bigotry and ignorance (which they reminded me multiple times)—I've decided to share what they wrote, here, while keeping their identity private. Given they also appeared concerned by what exactly I would say or me paraphrasing them/summarizing their words incorrectly, I've decided to just share the whole thing.

Almost. There's a portion at the end that is not included—specifically accusations of me being transmisic (guilty of transmisandry). Basically, I wrote, "in a time of unrest when the state wants us dead, trans emasculation alive and well," and cited a Bluesky thread. While I was citing it specifically for this image and how I related to the OP's opinion (read: "I think") as a fellow trans woman

the essayist we'll be examining clearly disliked the term, calling me transmisic.

And sure, that's fine! What's not fine is how they were pretty accusatory of me, implying a variety of things and generally making me—whether they meant to or not—pretty unwelcome (ultimatums, essentially). When I tried to approach them privately (outside the Discord server they were the admin for), this led to a rather unproductive back-and-forth—one referring to the portion of this essay I have chosen to omit; re: the author accusing me of being transmisic. Basically they got triggered by my use of the word, I got triggered by them being triggered (walking on eggshells), and it led to a rather unproductive private dialog where neither one of us felt like they were heard; e.g. (and to summarize), "you're making me feel like an invader" versus "you, a trans woman, aren't listening to me, a trans man." I could go on, but that's the gist.

The point being, MLs aren't just old straight white guys; the older bigotries endemic to Marxism, Leninism and Marxist-Leninism can bleed into more recent iterations of old ideologies; i.e., a kind of fatal exclusionary nostalgia that continues divide-and-conquer into the present: doing so much how older bigots did but carried out by today's "zoomers" versus yesterday's, either operating classically under chicken-hawk sway [e.g., Mao's cultural revolution and the weaponization of China's 1960s and '70s youth to help dictators/heads of state hold onto power].)

Rain Frog: https://www.tumblr.com/comrade-emma/799528166948536321/tonight-i-decided-to-binge-a-very-disturbing / Hammer and sickle in bio, used a Netflix show to dog whistle about trans men ( TME and TMRA [Trans men's rights activists, derogatory comparison to MRAs to delegitimize oppression] are used in the same essay it's referring to trans men ) TME is just transmisogyny exempt which is an entire can of worms ( flawed but not dog whistling trans men )

But hammer and sickle in bio, lots of posts about being an ml

Rain Frog: https://www.tumblr.com/bagea/792272793355108352/strapping-myself-with-the-bomb-that-kills-all

https://www.tumblr.com/bagea/777006489361645568/you-can-tell-that-a-lot-of-transmascs-are-insecure

https://www.tumblr.com/bagea/771346518422716416/mobile-suit-that-kills-all-transmascs

hammer and sickle in bio - few positive posts about Lenin - may just be a different flavor of communist but with the extremism and similar rhetoric ehhh

Rain Frog: Russianimperialist - ML ( unsurprisingly if I may add )

https://www.tumblr.com/russianimperialist/783681273206063104/trans-men-are-the-brahmins-of-the-trans-community

https://www.tumblr.com/russianimperialist/785110482422022144

Rain Frog: ML in bio

Birthday boy is an infantilizing insult used against trans men that someone made into a pride flag, notably there's a Hitler comparison on the reblog right underneath in the regular view ( if you're just scrolling ) - https://www.tumblr.com/beato-bolshevik/800433827712565248/the-idea-of-reclaiming-birthday-boy-within

https://www.tumblr.com/beato-bolshevik/783494624772784128/but-you-are-generalizing-trans-men-but-you-are

https://www.tumblr.com/beato-bolshevik/783494606020083712/why-do-you-so-desperately-want-to-be-coddled-about - more infantilization

And if you go to the notes there'll usually be a few dozen more and it's an ongoing thing. But yeah that's how a lot of the transfem and trans women MLs on tumblr want transmasc and trans men dead/not in the community/disbelief in oppression impacting trans men/transmascs differently and a belief in privileged status of trans men no matter what. And this did not even go into the exorsexism ( nbphobia ) and intersexism that community has. Just it's so deeply fascinating and concerning at the same time. Idk I find it interesting. I think there's active radicalization that's ongoing stemming from multiple flawed ideologies. And the result is a lot of people cutting themselves off from other parts of the community.

And not every ML hates trans men/transmascs and not every person that hates trans men/transmascs is an ML but there is a concerningly high overlap

Me: Okies. I'll make a list of these

Rain Frog: Cool! And if you need more to respond to usually if you go into the individual blog search and search "trans men" or "transmascs" you'll find some more essays to respond to. I think a lot of them are acting out of hurt more than anything else, and misplacing blame, but given I've had a few people at this point mention the overlap and some of the isolation techniques, idk seems like there's some radicalization elements going on that I wanted to raise the alert on

Such is the nature of politics in the Internet Age (meaning after Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin, etc)—not a division of the social and material, but "making things political" through action; i.e., as a socio-material-political phenomenon/cycle tied to larger poetic arguments making children and adults (as workers) "undead" in different ways/at cross purposes: that can unite under less "lobotomized" forms, thereof; re (from the Undead Module's "The Imperial Boomerang, part one"):

Capitalism is a hyperobject whose daily feeding is felt in the presence of undead trauma—the zombie apocalypse—as something to survive, which the elite manipulate through canon; i.e., as an argument for restoring the state, not dismantling it. [...] Such things are legion, marched into the sea as a means of scapegoating an awareness towards Capitalism functioning through genocide as something to harvest, as usual, through nature-as-monstrous-feminine to some degree nude and vulnerable, but also tokenized and rebellious on the same undead surfaces (above); i.e., as something that rises from the night of the living dead to the dawn, the day and so on. Such things are rooted in rebellion and enslavement as equally die-hard, there being countless examples of the living dead returning for state forces ("survivors") to do battle with; i.e., out of Hell, the underworld, the Valley of the Dry Bones, etc—what, in African studies, is a cycle commonly referred as the Kongo cosmogram, or the dead returning to life again and again:

(source, right: Dan Collen's "Did the Trailer for Tucker Carlson's Documentary Reference a Nazi Meme Co-opted From a Bigfoot Writer?" 2022)

Praxis is poetic, which happens through engagement with different registers (therefore ages) of communication, across space and time (and ghosts of different historical figures). Contrary to state leaders, the youth of the world don't exist solely as cannon fodder (and de facto mercenaries during stochastic terrorism alongside official police action)—meaning as "zombies" that canonically protect state productivity (and vertical arrangements of power). But reversing abjection requires visiting where it normally furthers itself: among the youth through imperfect discourse serving state aims through Gothic immaturity. Gothic Communism combats pro-state tutors through the inverse; i.e., whose subsequent maturity ties to its own de facto education, or one of its "creative successes"; re ("Abridged Manifesto Tree (of Oppositional Praxis)" from "Paratextual Documents"):

Note: This "tree" is a kind of map concerning canon vs camp during oppositional praxis. It is first introduced and discussed extensively in Volume Zero, and referenced throughout my entire book series, in some shape or form. Less in Volumes One and Two, and more in Volume Three, its essential function is to articulate the flow of power and information during praxial synthesis. Think of it as a thought guide of sorts, one that informs you of the flow of my own arguments relative to various ideas orbiting and occupying them. The words in pink are keywords, which are defined and unpacked in Volume Zero (most are in the series glossary). —Perse

Proletarian praxis revolves around camping canon, which goes something like this (abridged, from Volume Zero's manifesto tree):

Camp's assembly and production of cultural empathy under Capitalism happens according to the "creative successes" of proletarian praxis (manifesto terms intersect and overlap; e.g., "good sex education is sexually descriptive")

      • mutual consent
      • informed consumption and informed consent
      • sex-positive de facto education (social-sexual education; i.e., iconoclastic/good sex education and taught gender roles), good play/emergent gameplay and cathartic wish fulfillment/guilty pleasure (abuse prevention/risk reduction patterns) meant to teach good discipline and impulse control (valuing consent, permission, mutual attraction, etc); e.g., appreciative peril (the ironic damsel-in-distress/rape fantasy)
      • descriptive sexuality

during ludo-Gothic BDSM as things to materially imagine and induce (often through ironic parody and "perceptive" pastiche) through Gothic poetics; i.e., inside the "grey area" of cultural appreciation in countercultural forms (making monsters)

      • the culturally appreciative, sexually descriptive irony of Gothic counterculture's reverse abjection with sex-positive, demon BDSM, kink and fetishization; as well as asexuality and the ironic ontological ambiguities of trans, non-binary, intersex, and drag existence

[…] to foster empathy and emotional/Gothic intelligence by weird iconoclastic nerds reversing the canonical, unironic function of the Four Gs

      • reverse abjection
      • the emancipatory hauntology and Communist-chronotope operating as a parallel society—i.e., a parallel space (or language) that 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."
      • the Gothic Communist's good-faith, revolutionary cryptonymy

[…] On the flip-side, our would-be killers collectively lack emotional and Gothic intelligence; they do not respect, represent or otherwise practice our "creative successes." As we're going to establish by looking at the definition of weird canonical nerds (in the thesis statement), their conduct is quite the opposite of weird iconoclastic nerds; weird canonical nerds don't practice mutual consent; they canonize, thus endorse

      • uninformed/blind consumption through manufactured consent
      • de facto bad education as bad fathers, cops (theatrical function: knights) and other harmful role models/authority figures; i.e., canonical sex education and gender education, bad play/intended gameplay resulting in harmful wish fulfillment/guilty pleasure (abuse encouragement/risk production patterns); e.g., appropriative peril (the unironic damsel-in-distress), uninvited voyeurism, etc
      • prescriptive sexuality

through their own synthetic toolkits during oppositional praxis. They endorse

      • the process of abjection
      • the carceral hauntology/parallel space as a capitalist chronotope (e.g., the "blind" cyberpunk)
      • the complicit (thus bad-faith, bourgeois) cryptonymy

to further Capitalism's crises-by-design, hence its expected decay, according to a variety of bourgeois trifectas that lead to the banality of evil [through state arrangements of power relayed through the usual neoliberal stores: books and movies, but also videogames.]

There is also the basics of oppositional synthesis from our synthesis symposium in Volume One: girl talk (anger/gossip), monsters, camp. Refer to said symposium if needed; and "On Twin Trees" from Volume Zero, which talks about the manifesto tree more at length.

In a nutshell, Gothic Communism is "camping and recultivating the twin trees of Capitalism—the Base and Superstructure—during oppositional praxis, including its synthesis and catharsis [regarding the confrontation of generational trauma]" (source: Volume One). These are ideas that will appear more in Volume Three, aka the Praxis Volume; but it doesn't hurt to have an in-text copy within Volume Two's modules!

Hopefully these excerpts can help workers—however undead we feel—reduce toxicity, mid-abjection; i.e., in ways that let us unite towards universal liberation. Keeping that in mind, let's proceed with examining Bad Empanada; i.e., as someone not of the Gen-Z or Alpha generation, but certainly able to influence them in harmful ways (a "subject zero," infecting the queer youth with bad ideas).

Notes on Lenin, Stalin, and Why Marxist-Leninism Historically Sucks for Women and Queer People (with Bad Empanada being functionally Marxist-Leninist)

This section unpacks the harmful historical-material character to Marxist-Leninism; i.e., as a state apparatus geared towards love-bombing workers of the usual, pimped sort. Even so, these portions are ultimately surveys of dictators tied to larger ideas I've explored via Marx, elsewhere (re: "Understanding Vampires" and "The World Is a Vampire").

Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism vs Marxist-Leninism

As a Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communist, I really don't like Marxist-Leninism; i.e., because historically it's largely a bunch of straight white guys acting like pimps towards women and queer people; re: my critique of Marxist-Leninism in "Preface: Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism; or, Synthesizing Emotional/Gothic Intelligence through a Sex-Positive Gothic Mode":

First, a few things Gothic Communism tends to avoid, theory-wise. Gothic Communism strongly dislikes pure poststructuralist/psychoanalytical (e.g., Freud, Jung and Lacan) and Marxist-Leninist models (though it employs many of their ideas in an-Com ways); i.e., not only do these models tend to be dated, vaguely abstracting and sexist/queerphobic (as Stalin and Freud both were, above), but they are far more common in Gothic academia than I would like [...] Instead, I wrote Sex Positivity to marry Gothic/queer theory with Marxist, dialectical-material analysis/oppositional praxis, a process I have decided to call Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism. [...]

To be as thorough as I can, then, here is my definition for "Marxist-Leninism" alongside the abridged definition of "Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism)" and "anarcho-Communism":

Marxist-Leninism/"tankies"

An embryonic form of Socialism that, past and present, favors state models and nostalgia; i.e., one that hybridizes Marx and Engels with 20th century thinkers and leaders—most notably Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin, but also Mao, Castro and other state leaders/schools going into the 21st: through "tankie" apologia whitewashing the crimes of said leaders and their states as beings to worship and compromise with (Bad Mouse's "On Hakim's Nuance," 2025).

anarcho-Communism

The gradual disillusion and transmutation of Capitalism into Socialism and finally Communism through direct worker solidarity and collective action versus through state mechanism and argument; i.e., whereupon power is horizontally restructured away from state models and Marxism Leninism (and state power/state-regulated Capitalism).

Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism (abridged, full definition in ["Paratextual Documents"])

the titular term of my book series, so I'll quote the whole thing, here—expanded and updated substantially since 2023, in 2025, to account for my writing of four books after Volume Zero): Coined by me, Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism is the deliberate, pointed critique of capital/Capitalism and the state using a unique marriage of Gothic/queer/game theory and semi-Marxist (an-Com) ideas synthesized campily by sex-positive workers during proletarian praxis: developing systemic catharsis, mid-liminal expression during praxial opposition, using ludo-Gothic BDSM and palliative-Numinous dialogs (e.g., Metroidvania).

[...]

Beyond my understanding of the term, "Marxist-Leninist" was actually coined by Stalin around or after Lenin died, in the 1920s (from Wikipedia): "Marxism–Leninism was developed from Bolshevism by Joseph Stalin in the 1920s based on his understanding and synthesis of classical Marxism and Leninism. Marxism–Leninism holds that a two-stage communist revolution is needed to replace capitalism" (source). And Stalin, let's not forget, was a total-and-massive cunt who—among many other things, besides—enabled pedophilia in his own inner circle (re: Behind the Bastards' "Beria: Stalin's Pedophile Cop & the Soviet Oppenheimer"), made homosexuality illegal in [1934 (the year after Hilter burned down Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute of Sexology)] and, all in all, killed/displaced a shitload of people (millions) to reinforce his own cult of personality (e.g., Stalingrad—arguably the biggest battle in modern or medieval history—was strategically worthless to the Russians or the Germans; i.e., Stalin wanted the city defended and Hilter to conquer it [costing over a million soldiers on both sides] because it had "Stalin" in the name. If that's not vanity then I don't know what is). These men were not gods, nor should we treat them as such; they were the ruling class, and one whose state Capitalism [on Stalin's side] was largely nominal in its historical execution of Communism (and yes, the West undercut it, but Stalin and the Politburo that survived him still held the stickle during the harvest).

This being said, Stalinist Bolshevism isn't identical to Hilter's National Socialism, but both men were dictators, nonetheless (as was Mao, and by extension, American presidents, British Monarchs, and so on). In doing ludo-Gothic BDSM to develop Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism, we're not here to worship these darlings, but kill their legacies by camping their ghosts (and that of their offshoots; e.g., Creed, Kristeva, Butler, Foucault, Bad Empanada, etc); re: "the state is straight" and ASAB (from the Undead Module's "Understanding Vampires"):

To it, Bad Empanada is a Marxist-Leninist, valuing the material element to Marxist analysis, but also state mechanisms; i.e., he doesn't condone or support anarcho-Communism, treating its practitioners like hopeless hedonists and (as I shall explain) sex pests to lump in with genuine predators [emphasis, me; re: skeet, Bad Empanada: October 28th, 2025]. Except, the state is straight, historically the ultimate and constant enemy selling out and wearing down to abuse its own people; i.e., as expressed by Bad Empanada himself towards me and others like me, the state—whether it calls itself Socialist or capitalist—always prioritizes us fags and sex workers when the state of exception narrows (consider this sentence the Gothic, queer and thoroughly anarchistic thesis argument for "Understanding Vampires"). We can't afford to be strictly material in our investigations of capital, because much of praxis (and its synthesis in our daily lives) comes from the social component of media; i.e., that is produced as much by workers as corporations [source].

On gay rights and its history of abuse in the Soviet Union, I strongly recommend revolutionaryth0t's "Why did the USSR (re-)criminalize homosexuality?" and "What was life like for trans people in the Soviet Union?" (2025); see, also: my "Understanding Vampires" chapter (which discusses Marxist-Leninism and queerphobia alongside Bad Empanada, above and below). In other words, all bigotries are extant under capital, endemic to a struggle that occurs across all registers. We must push for intersectional solidarity (and consciousness) versus these internal/external factors; re: while synthesizing praxis that makes workers collectively more intelligent and aware of necessary struggle—a pedagogy of the oppressed healing from rape by systemically reducing state capacities for harm. This includes Stalin and company's harming of queer folk; or, in Chemical Mind's own words (from his aforementioned book, above):

Most gays [this frankly sounds a little odd coming from a non-queer person; i.e., "the gays"; e.g., similar to calling POC "blacks"] were either executed or lost status under Stalin, but that doesn't change the fact that the early Soviet Union pre-Stalin was relatively progressive in this regard. / Ultimately though, I want to make it clear that the persecution of LGBT people was not just a failure, but one of the Soviet Union's greatest failures that remained largely unrectified by the time of the Soviet Union's fall (source: "People from Another World - A Reappraisal of the USSR").

Revolutionaryth0t would say in their own video on trans people in the Soviet Union, "The USSR certainly wasn't a queer utopia" (timestamp: 0:36). Indeed, Marxist-Leninism surrounding queer people is generally a conversation that boils do to, "They sucked, but the West was worse!" Sure, but the USSR still sucked for queer people, its larger Achilles Heel being the state apparatus and tendency to decay into Capitalism (through "proletarian dictatorship," below):

(source: John Westmoreland's "Did Lenin inevitably lead to Stalin?" 2020)

Stalin and Company Haunting Marxist-Leninism into Present Discourse; or, Their Toxic Legacies Polluting Present Praxis

To it, we're not just discussing Stalin, solo, but Stalin and company under Marxist-Leninism into the present; i.e., as haunted by such men and their problematic legacies. Stalin and company regressed the rights of women and queer people, he and the other heads of state putting wartime women back in the kitchen after WWII (re: Red Pen's "Women at War: Communism") and again, (re)outlawing homosexuality until 1993—forty years after Stalin died and De-Stalinization had gone into effect (e.g., the Sino-Soviet split). The decriminalizing of queer rights happened in 1922 and 1926 in the RSFSR and the Ukrainian SSR (re: Uncola), only to re-criminalize in 1934—with Soviet cis women hobbled after WWII at the tail-end of Stalin and company's rule (ibid.). However, Lenin and Stalin were pals, insofar as Lenin believed "the abolition of classes is impossible without a dictatorship of the oppressed class, of the proletariat" (source: Lenin's "On the Slogan for a United States of Europe," 1915; cited: The Red Spectre's "Against Trotskyism"); i.e., Stalin was Lenin's chosen dictatorial successor. Furthermore, they were trusted friends; as the Red Spectre writes, "I don't even know how this myth [of Lenin hating Stalin/loving Trotsky] came to be. It's so wrong but for some reason will not die. Somehow, the same Lenin which called Stalin a 'Marvellous Georgian' hated him. Fair enough; we cannot expect Trotskyists to have a grasp of how friendships work" (source: "Against Trotskyism").

(source: Alan Wood's "In Memory of Leon Trotsky," 2024)

Note on Trotsky (2/7/2026): This portion of the document is rather unfair to Trotsky—or rather it glosses over the heated, messy, at times back-and-forth relations had between Trotsky and Lenin to focus, instead, somewhat myopically on Stalin and Lenin. So I'd like to mention a few points we don't have time to go into, here: One, the idea of "permanent/world revolution" versus "Socialism in one country" is, on its own, largely a question of Socialism before and after Stalin; i.e., no one before Stalin argued for one-country Socialism, which restricted the movement to a singular space vulnerable to crisis (Revolutionary Communists of America's "The Truth About Lenin and Trotsky," 2025; timestamp: 28:33). Two, Trotsky was a prominent figure of the Russian Revolution—one where Stalin, who betrayed Trotsky and Lenin, would prove himself a counterrevolutionary in bad faith; i.e., by accusing others, mid-DARVO-and-obscurantism. Three, "Trotskyism" in the late 1920s into Stalin's reign was a DARVO label of "counterrevolutionary activities"; i.e., levied by him and his yes-men against their primary foe and mutual friend to Lenin. RCA explains how Trotsky and Lenin had similar views on permanent revolution—views which required Socialism to occur everywhere, not just in Russia—and which, because both men were writing about them at the same time, led some to accuse Lenin of "Trotskyism" circa 1917 (timestamp: 19:52). Thereabouts, "Trotskyism" meant conciliation with different factions of the rebellion, namely workers and liberal party figures (an idea which Trotsky would abandon and Lenin absolve him of in the following years; timestamp: 25:31). However, by Lenin's death, it had a more us-versus vibe that Stalin—having gradually mislead Lenin—abused against Trotsky and world revolution, over time. This was preceded by Stalin's aforementioned betrayal of Lenin, which occurred slowly enough to fool the older man (nobody's perfect); i.e., whose friendship Stalin abused to become dictator of the proletariat in ways Lenin never envisioned or actually argued for. Allan Woods, of the RCA, writes,

In order to carry out a struggle against bureaucracy, Lenin advocated the setting up of a "Commission on Workers and Peasants Inspection" (RABKRIN), as the highest arbiter and guardian of party morality, and as a weapon against alien elements in the Soviet state apparatus. At the centre of RABKRIN Lenin placed a man whom he respected for his organisational abilities and strong character - Stalin.

Amongst other important functions, RABKRIN scrutinised the selection and appointment of responsible workers in the state and party. Whoever had the power to hold up the promotion of some and advance others obviously held a weapon which could serve their own interests. Stalin did not scruple to use it for his. RABKRIN turned from a weapon against bureaucracy into a hotbed of careerist intrigue. Stalin cynically used his position in RABKRIN, and later his control of the party Secretariat, to gather around himself a bloc of yes-men - nonentities whose only allegiance was to the man who helped them climb into comfortable positions. From the highest arbiter of party morality, RABKRIN sank to the lowest depths of bureaucratic cynicism.

Trotsky noticed what was going on before Lenin, whose illness prevented his close supervision of party work. Trotsky pointed out that "those working in RABKRIN are chiefly workers who have come to grief in other fields," and drew attention to the "extreme prevalence of intrigue in the organs of RABKRIN which has become a by-word throughout the country' (source: "Lenin's Last Struggle," 2023).

As such, my earlier statement "Stalin was Lenin's chosen dictatorial successor"—while not technically false, insofar as Stalin abused Lenin's friendship to set himself up as de facto ruler of the Soviet bureaucratic engine—is still me speaking a bit too soon/reductively regarding Lenin's choice and attitudes, while also overlooking the day-to-day complexities of what was actually going on between all three men (though I was initially correct in identifying Lenin's trust of Stalin being his Achille's Heel, later on). Like the Soviet Union's grander deterioration away from world revolution and into a bureaucratic mire, the decay of Stalin and Lenin's friendship/sealing of Trotsky's fate took time. To that, Woods explains how Lenin's behavior went from "[he] continued to defend RABKRIN against Trotsky's criticisms" to "Lenin's last advice to the party was to warn it against Stalin's 'disloyal' and 'intolerant' abuse of power and to advocate his removal from the post of General Secretary" (ibid.). Alas, Stalin only continued to consolidate power around himself afterwards, exiling and later killing Trotsky but not before outlawing homosexuality in 1934—in short, enacting the very kind of state vampirism I warn about in my own work (with "Anarcho-Communism vs Marxist-Leninism (re: State Vampirism)" [2026] citing another RCA piece, "From Emancipation to Criminalisation: Stalinist Persecution of Homosexuals from 1934" [2018], to discuss the longstanding harm Stalin caused: after betraying* not just Trotsky and Lenin, but Socialism as a whole).

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*Betrayal, then, is an important and reoccurring theme in Stalin's work, as he had Trotsky murdered in 1940; i.e., by having the killer pretend to be Trotsky's friend: "[Trotsky] was sitting at his desk in this studio in Coyoacan, Mexico, when Ramon Mercader – a Spanish-born Soviet agent, posing as Trotsky's friend but really under Stalin's orders – attacked him in the back of the head with a mountaineering ice pick" (source: Mee-Lai Stone's "Leon Trotsky Assassination Scene, 1940," 2013). More to the point, this occurred before Operation Barbarossa; i.e., when Stalin and Hitler were still pals, assassinating their political enemies in cold blood while divvying up the world stage to conduct state vampirism with state machinery on multiple fronts: behind a sham of Socialism, be it the Nazi or Soviet brand. It's very "Pot, meet Kettle," betrayal and consolidation of power away from workers a central theme in fascist activities. Fascists betray and generally by killing their friends in bad faith, sucking them dry. By betraying Trotsky and Lenin but also the very idea of Socialism that Marx and Engels laid out (warts and all), Stalin had effectively become the West's bête noir—a titanic scapegoat for them to leverage against future revolutionaries, cursing Socialism to a panoply of manufactured failures (and Red Scare) decades into the future. By that same token, Stalin's betraying of Communism (and steady homophobia) around the globe effectively gifted the CIA with their own counterrevolutionary blueprint: for counteracting world revolution themselves, after his death. Monkey see, monkey do—with bourgeois concessions towards workers in the West gradually dialed back over time, Bretton-Woods peeled away by neoliberalism into fascism cannibalizing those very same workers (and their children).

For what it's worth, Bad Empanada also thinks that Trotsky's a hero. So if there's any truth to what Spectre says, then that could explain Bad Empanada's lack of understanding regarding human connection (not that I think that Lenin or Stalin were "nicer" than Trotsky, who Stalin exiled and eventually murdered, years after Lenin kicked the bucket):

(source YouTube comments: Bad Mouse's "The Kronstadt Revolt | Marxist-Leninist Myths 3," 2025)

Spectre goes onto add a variety of sources arguing how Lenin had groomed Stalin to be his revolutionary heir—not from Stalin's accounts, but from Lenin's; e.g.,

It is terribly difficult to do this; we lack the men! But Preobrazhensky comes along and airily says that Stalin has jobs in two Commissariats. Who among us has not sinned in this way? Who has not undertaken several duties at once? And how can we do otherwise? What can we do to preserve the present situation in the People’s Commissariat of Nationalities; to handle all the Turkestan, Caucasian, and other questions? [...] These are questions that have engaged the attention of European states for hundreds of years, and only an infinitesimal number of them have been settled in democratic republics. We are settling them; and we need a man to whom the representatives of any of these nations can go and discuss their difficulties in all detail. Where can we find such a man? I don't think Comrade Preobrazhensky could suggest any better candidate than Comrade Stalin (emphasis, me; source: Lenin, "Eleventh Congress Of The R.C.P.(B.)," 1922)

(source: The Gay Liberator, no. 42, 1974; cited: Persephone van der Waard's "Making Marx Gay")

To it, Marxist-Leninism may have come from Stalin directly, but he married Marx and Lenin together in ways that Lenin obviously had a profound impact on (and Marx and Engels' own homophobia impacting both men, above). Whatever concessions were made regarding queer/women's rights were ultimately rescinded—replaced with the usual abuses that defenders of Stalin apologize for under current regimes; re, as I write regarding Bad Empanada, Stalin, and Bad Empanada emulating Stalin by dismissing my arguments out-of-hand (from the Undead Module):

try to understand that it is both possible to be right and wrong at the same time (as you often are); e.g., Beethoven was right, but not always (see: Napoleon; re: John Clubbe)—he was also a massive prick who alienated just about everyone around him. And Stalin, despite outlawing homosexuality in the Union, had a pedophile best friend who raped little girls for fun (Behind the Bastard's "Part One: Beria: Stalin's Pedophile Cop," 2024). In either case, denouncing or otherwise poo-pooing such critiques by focusing on what your political/academic rivals' actual or perceived flaws are (attached to their queer character, as you so often do) is, itself, thoroughly bad praxis (source: "Understanding Vampires").

(source: Sakshi Venkatraman's "Russian voters back referendum banning same-sex marriage," 2020)

This isn't just Bad Empanada defending Stalin, though, but Lenin using Stalin to fall into the very queerphobic traps that harm the image of Communism well into the present (with Putin, above, outlawing gay marriage in 2020):

Please bear in mind, we'll look at Lenin's refreshingly queer-friendly exceptions—but also his tragic failure to keep Stalin and Soviet regression (thus fascism) in check—when we examine Dr. Uncola's tweets about early Soviet queer progressivism, in "Leaving the Closet":

An important disclaimer, however, is that the national attitude towards gay and trans people wasn't unanimously supportive. While many were sympathetic or ambivalent, there was a faction of the Bolsheviks who wanted it outlawed again. Among them was this guy. You might know him [shows photo of Stalin] (source tweet, Dr. Uncola: July 1st, 2023).

In short, there was no place for gay people in their view of the world when push came to shove (again, we'll unpack this more when we look at Stalin). From Stalin onwards (and Mao, too, and all of their imitators), Marxist-Leninism decays under threat of force to sacrifice queer rights, thus spiral towards nominal Communist fragmentation and neoliberal Capitalism and Marxist Capitalist Realism; i.e., said states (and their cops) abusing the environment and nature at great expense of worker and animal life and contributing towards climate change as all states do. All States Are Bad! ASAB! [...]

Including Bad Empanada's unironically Stalinist rhetoric ("make it illegal [taboo] again"), we need to meaningfully challenge all of these inherited confusions and misconceptions, lest we fall into the same dogmatic pitfalls (and academic, cis-het hubris) that people like Bad Empanada are currently doing in their own mixed work; i.e., using veiled sodomy argumentation (re: BDSM bans) to actively close their minds, punching down to help one group at the cost of another by demonizing the latter having its own equally valid concerns. Again, my criticism speaks not to Bad Empanada's rightful treatment of Jessie Gender as Zionist, but to his weird dogwhistle calling "all discussions" of sex (except his) to be made taboo (ibid.).

Dictators are no different than kings, and to call them "necessary" is to apologize for them (and their abuse) in all the usual ways. It's dangerous to lionize dictators outright, including their enablers; and while Lenin and Stalin helped usher in queer/women's rights for a small "love bombing" window during the interwar period, those men surviving Lenin including Stalin and Trotsky quickly rescinded these rights; re: because the state is straight/patriarchal and frankly so are many Marxist-Leninists; e.g., those like Second Thought, Hakim and Yugopnik supporting Bad Empanada despite me asking them not to:

(red text: "And for anyone saying these men somehow 'didn't know' who Bad Empanada was while working together, I'm sorry but that's bullshit; the man has a longstanding reputation for being an outspoken dick. Big channels stick to the Algorithm (and its metrics) like glue, and anyone saying otherwise is defending toxicity within their own movement. Ignoring all the evidence given here, do you really expect me to believe you didn't do a background check on him? That you didn't hear him saying ableist and trans phobic slurs in his videos? In your own subreddit? What kind of fool do you take me for? A blind eye is a blind eye, and all three of you are turning it pretty fucking hard. Furthermore, just because I'm not the kind of victim you want (an an-Com trans sex worker versus a white and/or straight Marxist-Leninist) doesn't make your inaction any less bigoted/moderate in its stonewalling and plausible deniability. Intent and ignorance don't matter, outcomes do; stop making exceptions for you and yours!")

So when I say to "Make Marx Gay" (therefor Stalin and Lenin as emblems of Communism), I don't mean apologize for the men themselves by slapping rainbows on them (a kind of Rainbow Capitalism, but also Socialist Realism that views the past through rose-tinted glasses, above). We have to kill our darlings and move onto something better than all of them, combined. To that, Lenin and Stalin were two sides of the same baneful coin, poisoning Marxism (which already wasn't perfect); i.e., with conservative elements that turned women like Alexandra Kollontai into a victim:

With the defeat of the Workers' Opposition Kollontai appeared to give up her fight for reform and for women, retreating into relative obscurity. With the rise of Stalin her life became one of de facto exile, although formally she was USSR diplomat for Mexico and Norway before settling in Sweden. She was thus the first female diplomat in western history. Dying of natural causes in 1952, Kollontai was the only member of the Workers' Opposition to survive the purges [emphasis, me]. She lived the last 20 years of her life in constant fear of assassination or imprisonment (source: Jenny Morrison's "Women on the left: Alexandra Kollontai," 2012).

As I write:

So, it sounds like Lenin was more inclusive than Marx and Engels, right? Sure, points for Lenin for not closeting queers and kettling/staking them like vampires (a low bar but one he fairly met). The problem is, Lenin needed muscle for his revolution and Stalin—a Georgian gangster and Lenin's righthand man—filled that role. But once Lenin died, in 1924, Stalin began to muscle in/prey on Lenin's former operation (and even before his death, let's be honest). He exiled Trotsky in 1929 and enacted the first of the purges in 1938 (only to kill Trotsky while the other man was in exile, in 1940). Between those, he also made homosexuality illegal in 193[4 (re: the year after the Nazis burned Hirschfeld's Sexology Institute to ashes] (source: "Leaving the Closet," 2024).

Yet, you still have chatrooms and comment sections celebrating these men like they were gods:

Stalin and company had already outlawed queerness, in 1938 (above), and a year later would be cozying up to Hitler to divvy up Poland; i.e., as imperialists, ergo capitalists do "according to plan"; re: Lenin's "necessary" dictatorship of the proletariat—one that arbitrarily brutalized the routine of older regimes by men suddenly able to be "king for a day." Just because the Nazis called themselves "socialists" doesn't mean they functioned as such. The same goes for Lenin and Stalin, the latter who didn't usher in a golden age of Communism through Marxist-Leninism after Lenin's death despite calling himself a "Communist"; he befriended the fascists, imitating some of their worst aspects before failing to assign anyone to succeed him (the same issue Mao had, and one Lenin—rather short-sighted, in hindsight—didn't seem to account for). The state and its machinery are historically treacherous, decaying towards fascism by making deals with fascists (German or American, in Stalin's case). So despite Socialism for All saying "don't be that guy" regarding Bad Empanada (which is valid, below)

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his channel seems to have more Stalinist apologia in it, jacking Stalin off as some kind of well-spoken "charmer" versus any valid, extended critiques of the guy. It's not "Red Scare" or "horseshoe theory" to critique tankies, my dudes; and it takes more than pretty words from men of great violence and power to win over their usual historical victims. "Socialism for all," you say? Unless you're gay, right? Fascism is a system of exceptions, one of the first exceptions that Stalin made (to he and Lenin's dictatorship of the proletariat) queer folk, followed by women. Or, as Marx himself wrote; re: "Capital is dead labour, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks" (source: "Limits of the Working-Day," 1867). How apt, given how much Stalin and company suck, but also Bad Empanada in ways that uphold these two-faced cunts; or, as my partner Bay puts it, "Late-stage capital is a fallacy. Capitalism was born to decay—mortality trying to outrun itself; i.e., in a world for which immortality doesn't exist/requires too much to exist. Even supermassive black holes aren't immortal." As for Bad Empanada, he's everything I hate about Marxist-Leninism (and incels), but so are his stupid friends defending him in bad faith:

(source skeet, vanderWaardart [to johnnythewolf's reply]: November 6th, 2025)

Further Critiques on Marxist-Leninism (from Other Researchers)

For some excellent critiques of Marxist-Leninism besides mine, refer to Bad Mouse's "Marxist-Leninist Myths" series (e.g., "The Molotov Ribbentrop Pact" and the state-level "kayfabe*" that implied, 2025) and "The Defeatist Arguments of Stalinism" (2025); i.e., concerning the state through Stalin's dictatorship saying "trust me, bro" before enacting various disastrous policies, before and after his death; e.g., the Holodomor famine and Chelyabinsk-40—with Bad Empanada defending the famine by saying it was just government incompetence that caused all those deaths ("The Holodomor Genocide Question," 2022), while the latter not only was installed before Stalin died, in 1945 (source: Alan Bellows' "In Soviet Russia, Lake Contaminates You," below—2008), but whose environmental damage was the direct result of its own lies and incompetency (T. Folse Nuclear's "Almost as Bad as Chernobyl?" 2025). Marxist-Leninism was bad for people [male, female or intersex] and the environment:

*See: "State Kayfabe," next section.

To that, most an-Coms are environmentalists, whereas the Soviet state did plenty of fucked-up shit to the environment; e.g., the Holodomor famine, but also late-Soviet-era cotton monoculture, fertilizer mismanagement and evaporation of the Aral sea (source: New Scientist's "Soviet Cotton Threatens a Region's Sea - and Its Children," 1989), Chelyabinsk-40 and the USSR's production and storage of nuclear waste (source: Alan Bellows' "In Soviet Russia, Lake Contaminates You") and of course, the initial infamous suppression of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster (which, while oversold by HBO many years later under neoliberal Red Scare [...] was still a terrible event and black eye for non-militarized nuclear power in the Western bloc)! / Combined, it's not exactly a surprise the country is romanticized post hoc as a nuclear wasteland; i.e., there's some truth to it [...] abuse of the environment is historically queerphobic in ways Marxist-Leninism was not above doing. Per Mao and Stalin, they rapidly industrialized to militarily compete with the United States; this "worked," but led to great famines and ecological disasters if not equivalent to neoliberal Capitalism currently then certainly the lesser of two evils (emphasis on evil, there). Except, such deflective gambits didn't lead them to "defeat" the United States; i.e., the Soviet's sold out long before the Fall, and China is only nominally Communist as they presently exist (source: "Leaving the Closet").

In other words, queerphobia and environmental destruction, per Marxist-Leninism, historically go hand-in-hand; i.e., if you're looking the other way regarding the harming of one, chances are you'll do so for the other, too. Stalin and Mao certainly did, grinding people up like meat (to a similar wide-scale degree as Hitler or the Americans)! Why? Because Marxist-Leninism argues for a dictatorship, meaning with capitalistic effects that occur when capital bullies it into paranoia. That's not a question of "if "(the primary difference between bullied MLs and an-Coms being an-Coms don't have the levers of state power when leaning to the right)! ASAB! ADAB! All States and Dictators Are Bad!

(artist: Alex Andreev)

State Kayfabe and Vampirism: Emulating Marxist-Leninism's Dictators, from Stalin to Mao

"Capital is a vampire," Marx argued; "fascism is capital in decay," Lenin replied. I want to close out this book with a theoretical exercise, one looking at state kayfabe and vampirism; i.e., a kind of pimp-ish theatre, onstage and off, and one where different dictators emulate different strongmen tied to state models: Stalin and Mao, kayfabe and vampirism. The two ideas go hand-in-hand, but we'll use Stalin when focusing on kayfabe and Mao when emphasizing vampirism/state parasitoidism. We'll nonetheless focus on Marxist-Leninism, overall, therefore the Soviets and Chinese of 20th century models that Bad Empanada celebrates in fascist ways; i.e., despite his "leftist" aesthetic (and broken-clock moments). Even so, the same basic arguments I make, here, also apply to Western powers: the state rapes by design, is straight, furthers abjection by pimping nature as monstrous-feminine (for productivity and/or profit), etc.

Note: While such things can reverse abjection when workers reclaim the poetry of vampirism for universal liberation, here, we're only focusing on the state abusing the function/aesthetic of vampirism to pimp nature as monstrous-feminine all-the-usual (refer to the materials mentioned in "Poetry Exercise" to see such powers reclaimed by unpaid workers; i.e., care or sex breaking Capitalist Realism; e.g., "The World Is a Vampire" viewing such ideas [especially Plato's cave] through a ludological refrain: the bloodsport).

(artist: Axel Ross; cited: "Modularity and Class," 2024)

Stalin's Kayfabe: the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact

Returning to kayfabe, let's consider Stalin the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact through a vampiric lens; i.e., specifically the Secret Protocols of a non-aggression pact between the USSR and Nazi Germany (TimeGhost History, 2020), the subsequent spheres of influence meant for them to wage war against Europe in all the usual imperialist ways (not that Europe isn't an imperial power but I digress): carving up older territories into newer shapes by current heads of state/military leaders acting as dictators do (the protocols denied by the Soviets until 1989: "The Congress of People's Deputies of the Soviet Union declares the secret protocols of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact null and void and invalid from the moment of their signing"; source: Communist Crimes). States lie to workers by design, but those reasons can still have a lot going on; i.e., the curious case of the Soviets and the Nazis more a case of "strange bedfellows" than straight-up "ride and die" (no honor among thieves, the biggest thieves being nation-states). In TimeGhost's own words (the pinned comment in their video's comment section):

Is the Soviet Union basically an Axis Power between 1939 and 1941? Technically the answer is a definite "no" because the USSR will never sign the Tripartite Pact, but it's still worth thinking about. The USSR and Nazi Germany will cultivate a pretty productive relationship after they sign the Non-Aggression Treaty, not only prompting a joint occupation of Poland but also allowing Hitler to invade Western Europe without having to worry about his eastern borders. So when you look at it like that, the USSR directly supported the Nazi war machine. On the other hand, it is probably a bit of a leap to blame the USSR for Nazi expansionism, and Stalin is forced by circumstances to enter into the Pact. The USSR is not ready to fight a war at this point, and the treaty buys not only time but also space, creating a virtual buffer zone between Germany and the Motherland in the form of Poland. Cynical and calculated, yes, but that's diplomacy for you. Stalin will obviously offer a very extreme interpretation of this second argument after the war, casting Soviet actions as a necessary defensive measure against the imperialism of the Western Powers and their supposed encouragement of Nazi Germany. Stalinist myth-making aside, the argument that defensive considerations is a significant factor in the Soviets signing of the Pact does have some merit.

Again, the "necessity" of dictators, per Lenin, does a lot of heavy lifting/gives Stalin carte blanche, post hoc; i.e., when you see the Soviets invading Poland, Finland and elsewhere—basically gobbling up everything in sight to protect the Soviet project and its leaders/their heroic cults of personality (ergo death; re: Eco), the citizens of these countries generally casualties in all the usual ways. "Theirs was a friendship signed in blood," Stalin said of Hitler and himself after Poland's invasion (Real Time History's "Blitzkrieg Unleashed? World War 2 1939-1940," 2025; timestamp: 23:02). Rape is rape, "necessary" or not; the state, through kayfabe, sucks like the vampire does, to engorge the tyrant at the top:

(source: Matt Whittaker's "What Was the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact?" 2023)

Mind you, Stalin also said his "forged in blood" comment after his own terrors and purges before 1939—the very dictatorship Lenin called "necessary" before he died, and one he helped facilitate in ways that led to similar degrees of starvation and bloodshed normally enacted by their ideological enemies. Sadly Horseshoe Theory isn't total nonsense—though it classically apologizes for American genocide, Western Liberalism and Pax Americana through foreign interference on the world stage; i.e., nation-states all kind of suck, only differing in a flavor and degree of said sucking (and our Gothic an-Com's criticism of them holistic, below):

(source: Stephen Coles' "'U.S.A. Surpasses All The Genocide Records!' Poster and Fact Sheet," 2016; cited: "Symposium: Aftercare; What Is the Gothic?" 2023)

For Stalin and his supporters (which included the US during WWII, calling Stalin "Uncle Joe"), the vampiric function of capital and state power remained—one which such devastation would continue indiscriminately for decades into the present, and which some MLs today continue to apologize for regarding Stalin [and men like him]: Lenin's flaw [and that of those fighting fire with fire in his and Marx' name] being how the Bolsheviks, at least for some of their victims [re: women and gay people], became functionally indistinguishable from the Nazis; e.g., no functional difference between Russian gulags and Nazi concentration camps [the same goes for the Chinese and their own "nominal Communism," as we'll see with Mao]. The MLs defending the Soviets, then, "put all their eggs into one basket," centering power around state leaders who historically embody all the usual flaws state power affords—meaning versus anarcho-Communism teaching society as a whole not to worship vertical power but instead distribute knowledge (a form of power) evenly among workers, not leaders; i.e., in horizontal forms that actually strengthen the movement over time; re: Stalin left no heir, and those who succeeded him leaned into the same imperial character he himself had done that ultimately decayed backwards (e.g., Afghanistan).

(exhibit 3: Artist, top-far-left: Liu Chunhua; top-mid-left: Jacques Louis David; bottom-left: Chen Yanning; top-right: Bungie; bottom-right: William Blake. City or nation, state revolutionaries [and their poppy-red sanguine] historically decay into tyranny—from Caesar to Vlad Dracul [the dragon a symbol of status, sex and power] to Napoleon to George Washington to Mao—both in and out of fiction, with "purely" fictional additions [e.g., Shakespeare's "historical" play and its famous line: "Et tu, Brutae?"] actually gigantic "vampire hauntologies" that bear a non-fictional stamp; e.g., Balor the Leveler [and his own "dragon's" red cape of power, top-right] built on top of stories of stories of stories; i.e., the narrative of the crypt; re: from Hogle's "The Restless Labyrinth: Cryptonymy in the Gothic Novel." However cryptomimetic these seem, they nonetheless bear a kernel of truth [as all vampires do]: dictators suck. Stemming from and venerated by city-states to nation-states in ways that historically-materially decay due to the fallibility of men and corruptibility of the structures propping them up—they're what Marx would describe as "the tradition of all dead generations [that] weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living"; i.e., while history repeats first in tragedy, then in farce [source: Marx' "Eighteenth Brumaire"].

Of Napoleon, for example, Beethoven would excoriate for his own betrayals: "On May 18, 1804, the French council of State declared Napoleon Emperor of the French. Upon hearing the news, an angry Beethoven crossed off the Eroica's first inscription to Bonaparte. (11) 'So he too is nothing more than an ordinary man,' he cried out" [source: John Clubbe's "Beethoven, Bryon and Bonaparte"]. In keeping with the vampirism of such person[a]s, there's a second red-caped version of "Napoleon crossing the Alps," such auto-apologia cryptomimetically reviving spectres of Caesar into the present space and time [czars or chairmen]: for Mao and Stalin to imitate in dated, dishonest, star-struck ways; i.e., when nation-building around their own cults of strength, hopelessly stuck in the same tyrannical time-space/mood of "angry short man who thinks he's center of the universe" a repeatable echoed syndrome [see: "Bad Dreams, part three: the Monomyth and Cycle of Kings" (2024) for an exhaustive look at this concept in and out of media, below].

For example, Chen Yanning's 1972 painting shows Mao leading the people after the famines he helped cause—one that remains hopelessly stuck in a similar vein of apologia as David's ahistorical portrait of Napoleon [called "the Ogre" by his enemies]: while abusing state models using state propaganda. Of Chunhua's work, Dr. Kristen Loring Brennan writes: 

In "Chairman Mao en Route to Anyuan," Liu Chunhua adapted Chinese landscape conventions to a new style and purpose—an evocative portrayal that suggested that Mao was capable of leading the country toward revolution. He pictured his subject emerging atop a mountain with clouds of mist below. In China, landscapes such as this often evoked immortal realms, or extraordinary sites invested with the misty vapors of the mountain. However, a telephone pole is discernible in the lower left corner of the composition, and water cascades from a dam in the right—hints of modernity within the ethereal landscape. With an umbrella tucked beneath one arm and the other hand clenched into a fist, and wearing windswept robes, Mao appears superhuman, yet also practical and charismatic.

As a prominent icon in the Cultural Revolution, "Chairman Mao en Route to Anyuan" celebrated the grassroots nature of revolutionary history and cultivated devotion to Mao during a tumultuous time. As a brilliant example of Chinese Communist Party propaganda, it was reportedly reproduced over nine hundred million times, and distributed widely in print, sculpture, and other media [source].

Such relics are, in turn, Hogle's ghost of the counterfeit[1]—the forgery of power in ways to enact its charlatan continuation through performance and lie going Gothically hand-in-hand; i.e., with their tragic rediscovery later in the same epoch—the Promethean Quest being partly to steal power from the past to commit new atrocities with:

Under such oppressive surveilling conditions, a pastoral backwater easily becomes a killing field, one where the owner class (and those aping them, below) attack their victims with endless impunity (expressing total ownership over, in perpetuity): laying everything to waste (re: Ozymandias' "colossal wreck")! So the Promethean Quest steals power from the past as genocidal—marked cryptomimetically by ghosts of genocide to steal power from again (and again), doing so out of perpetual (at times indiscriminate) revenge! [source: Persephone's Silksong Symposium," 2025].

Found later still by enterprising men like Bad Empanada and his fans/other MLs in the Internet Age, the lot of them play "follow the leader"; i.e., as a ghost to capture and harness, doing with the hopes of one day standing in their mighty shoes: drooling at Ozymandias' "colossal wreck," eager to shamelessly defend without necessary camp and criticism. To apologize for dictators is to apologize for states, thus capital and the Numinous power abuse [therefore rape] they mendaciously and traitorously enact on ordinary people.)

Rape is rape, torture is torture, starvation is starvation—only the state (nation- or city-) capable of such things to the degree dictators historically carry out (exceptions being made for nomadic conquerors like Genghis Khan and Tamerlane). Speaking of which, this "state vampirism" includes Mao and his own atrocities after Stalin bought the farm: on the backs of the workers he lied to and exploited, supping on the blood of the proletariat in all the ways Marx warned about; i.e., so-called "dead labor" suddenly personified: a "master vampire" within structures of mastery that maintains a pyramid structure, the thralls at the bottom serving those higher up—with apex predators like Mao at the tippy-top while people past, present and future continue to defend him. Let's not!

(source: Jonathan Chatwin's "the girls Mao Zedong had sex with," 2022)

Mao's Vampirism: Bad Empanada's Favorite Dictator? 

Here's a small addendum on Mao, if only because Bad Empanada (and his community, below) seemingly worship the man; re: Bad Empanada's 2024 YouTube community post asking for the discussion of sex to be made taboo—meaning in ways not unlike Stalin, but also Mao: the "ultimate" incel/state predator basking in lap-of-luxury double standards (and hypocrisies, below).

Mao is seemingly the very man BE and company want to be—a predator false preacher whose own ML-style predation is unironically harmful towards the world, all while disguising state parasitoidism behind a shared black-and-red. Calling for the policing of sex is a classic pimp tactic, and Mao was certainly a pimp; e.g., Jung Chang's "Was Mao a Maoist?" or Mao: The Unknown Story (2006) discussing Mao's mythmaking as equally pimp-like; i.e., dictators exhibiting a fair degree of reinvention throughout their lives built on kernels of truth. To that, Mao was an excellent guerrilla who outmaneuvered and survived 1930s Chinese nationalism... only to replace/outdo it, murder-wise. Indeed, dictators embody capital's ravenous, unironically vampiric qualities that Marx warned about (despite his own homophobia); i.e., they're heads of state and the state eats everything while lying about it: dead labor feeding on living labor, insofar as dictators take on machine-like qualities when alive.

So while the Cambodian genocide under Pol Pot (an event antagonized between rival nations and Western bombing campaigns) led to an "auto-genocide," for example (re: from Volume Three's  "Defined Through Sex: Sex Normativity in Popular Media," below—2025),

various forms of self-destruction [occur] within fascism on a gradient; i.e., Eco's "cult of death" point from "Ur-Fascism"; e.g., the "death before dishonor" mentality of the Nazi SS and mirror syndrome versus the Khmer Rouge's more literal "auto-genocide" approach—the former toxifying Socialist argumentation and aesthetics versus Cultural Marxism, and the latter toxifying Marxist-Leninist rhetoric with Stalinist paranoia and French noble-savage argumentation: to push for Final Victory in one, and the other for a Year-Zero erasure of the present world; i.e., out of the same-old revenge arguments in either case pushing towards post-Rubicon desperation whenever the leader might otherwise appear to be mistaken; re: "the leader is always right" being a fascist principle, both regimes being sick with genocide as something to exact: military optimism becomes a cult of death (often a mechanical one, if industry is preserved, or an inhumane and primitive one, if not; re: insect politics," regardless).

Except the latter example literally cannibalized its own population, doing so for ideological and material reasons: they had destroyed their country's food production and declared everyone inside an Enemy Within; i.e., fascism is a disguise that eats itself for the state to the state's detriment because the state relies on inherent us-versus-them paradoxes to alienate, fetishize and pimp nature with. So while the Nazis ate themselves alive on the Eastern front, the Khmer Rouge literally did it at home (and lied about it to hold onto power). It weakens itself to then feed on the already-vulnerable: a horrific self-lie as you immolate, then eat your own children, calling them "brood" (mirror syndrome reaching delusionally inwards). [...]

(artist: Francisco Goya)

This is why I'm an anarchist, kids (re: "Preface"); Marxist-Leninism "horseshoes" into fascism because the state, Marxist or not, always decays to protect itself by eating itself through lies that hijack its own war/persecution mechanisms; re: punching the alien as a disease to purify through military optimism devolving into persecution mania and finally death. This isn't a "bug" but a feature of the nation-state model, which capital balloons; i.e., from decimation, or one tenth of a population being killed as practiced by the Romans to their victims, to the Khmer Rouge arguably killing over half of theirs: "Cambodia's last census before the Khmer Rouge came to power in April 1975 was held in 1962. It counted the country's population at 5.729 million" (source: Ben Kiernan's "The Demography of Genocide in Southeast Asia"); estimates for the genocide range "between 1.5 and 3 million" (source: University of Minnesota's "Cambodia").

the above fatalities for that nation were far smaller than the ~40 million committed by Mao and his so-called "Great Leap Forward" (all genocides being bad, or things comparable to genocides; i.e., "accidental" famines). Indeed, "Great Leap Forward" is synonymous with "Mao" just as much as his early marvels (e.g., the Long March); i.e., "heavy lies the crown" with dictators who—as the heads of state—bear the burden for their failed policies (with hunger being an ancient weapon of war designed to keep workers in check): Mao denying his own failures, his repeated doing so arguably the opposite of heroic (with pimps being giant cowards who historically abuse woman, whom they chattelize for power and profit).

To that, Mao wasn't just a murderous state leader who killed millions of people—i.e., on par with Stalin, FDR and Hitler—as well as someone who betrayed those around him later in life (see: "the Cultural Revolution"); he was a massive hypocrite prone to being exceedingly gross behind his own legendary status (a tactic Bad Empanada wears on his sleeve, almost eager to be as gross as possible while acting beyond reproach: fake it till you make it). This includes Mao's toxically masculine treatment of women, pimping out the peasantry as he aged

(source)

Many of the women that Mao slept with were daughters of poor peasants who Li said believed that sleeping with the chairman was the greatest experience of their life. Mao was happiest and most satisfied when he had several young women simultaneously sharing his bed, and he encouraged his sexual partners to introduce him to others. He often told the young women to read the Taoist sex manual "The Plain Girl's Secret Way," in preparation for their trysts (source: The Private Life of Chairman Mao [1994] by Dr. Li Zhisui; cited: "Mao's Private Life," 2016).

but also his bodily functions, in general. So while "girls shit," for example, might be used to humanize women versus placing them on a pedestal, Mao would seem to rub his own fecal matter in peoples' faces:

the man was chronically constipated. As Ludwig describes, the chairman's bodyguards were "trained not only to protect him against enemies but also to give him enemas if they failed" at prying the stubborn poop from his butt with their fingers first. / Even Mao's poops were regarded as special occasions. At the end of a nine-day bout of constipation his employees rejoiced, "The chairman's bowels have moved!" (source: A.C. Grimes' "The Disgusting Truth," 2023).

In short, Mao and similar cult leaders worked through state models to monopolize vampirism in kayfabe-style ways. But we can take our power back from them, "on the Aegis." While we won't have time to unpack that idea, here, I'd at least like to point you in the right direction; re: "on the Aegis," such food for thought hopefully turning you away from creepy weirdos like Bad Empanada calling us "sex pests." I'd say "pot, meet kettle," except my friends and I (unpaid labor) aren't harming anyone. Bad Empanada, by comparison, does: harming others by first advocating for harm, then trying to pin his own behaviors onto those he feeds on; re: a Puritanical Ozzie expat, one laundering his own reputation by moving to the Global South while punching down at marginalized populations in bad-faith. Show him your Aegis, then watch him and his friends betray their fascist goals (dropping the mask, below—not for Musk, in his case, but Trump; re: "Go to town, Donald")! Weird canonical nerds follow the leader into an early grave:

In Closing: Such Men Suck, and How to Take Our Power Back from Them "on the Aegis"

Never meet your heroes but especially dictators, who tend to be weird and quick-to-anger—again, like Bad Empanada unironically imitating such persons. He might make a funny face and pass it all off as "humor" (or whatever he's aiming for, below). In truth, it's a thinly-veiled disguise for someone who'd swap places with Mao if he could; re: Bad Empanada only cares about power and getting it, desiring to be "great" in ways that are hardly conducive to universal liberation. He's just as hungry as Mao, but lacking in that man's godly power (or militant skills)—with "revolution" a front for imperial appetite, a casualty of the usual bald-faced lies Bad Empanada shamelessly tells. He's a "Castro clone," minus the gay elements. Indeed, his desire to imitate such people, even "in jest," appears to lack any irony at all: ordering others to give him their money without a shred of dignity or forethought (enjoying the double standard of pimping himself out). He'll run a hate campaign versus my friends and I, then boast about his own money made/swollen intellect. Like Stalin and Mao, he's a parasitoid—the very unironic sort we camp in duality yet endure his harmful rhetoric stealing our language away from us: vampirism and kayfabe, dogmatizing such matters to monopolize such things, mid-abjection; re: through DARVO and obscurantism, pimping state prey for using the same language to reverse abjection.

(source)

Beyond Stalin or Mao, all so-called "Great Men of History" suck because they're tied to capital doing what capital does: killing people by moving money through nature to try and live forever (the banality of evil the bourgeoisie exhibit, as a whole). Whether a dictator of the "proletariat" or nakedly of the bourgeoisie owning factories/other forms of capital, a dictator is a dictator and loves to make exceptions: "boundaries for me, not for thee" while self-aggrandizing and treating giant numbers of people like "spilt milk." Profit is profit, megadeath is megadeath—workers ignominiously reduced to mere statistics (necrometrics) by cruel arbiters of "necessary" state violence; i.e., dictators under capital and imperialism (or anywhere else) are rapists, and for which the number of apologist who exist kissing their long-dead asses are just as staggering as the casualties their masters inflicted, once upon a time; re: Bad Empanada and his ilk, who carry out "the tradition of all dead generations [that] weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living"  (re: Marx). They don't camp Mao (or Marx, for that matter); they suck his ghostly dick, hungry (and nostalgic) for that sweet, sweet power dictators famous enjoy (and lie to others about, passing themselves off as "celibate" knowing it's bullshit).

(source: James Keating's "Mao's Great Leap Forward & How It Killed Millions," 2024)

Time is a circle, "Communist" obscurantism merely window dressing that cannot conceal "dictator" being "warlord" by another name, one used historically in bad faith. Like a fatal portrait, then, history repeats first in tragedy, then in farce—dictators a dubious "solution" to capital that takes power away from workers at great expense; i.e., churches to worship at, MLs routinely putting their faith in such men versus admitting to themselves and others that Lenin and Stalin were wrong ("follow the leader" being a fascist tactic). And let's be honest, it's not like dictators ever truly "get along" (re: Operation Barbarossa or the Sino-Soviet Split). Rather than tragedy or farce, the third option, I argue, is camp—breaking the spell on a horizontal (anarchistic) level that said dictators (and capital as a whole) has over workers like Bad Empanada, killing our darlings; but that is a topic I've explored elsewhere at length (re: "Interrogating Power through Your Own Camp").

As you walk away from this book, then, remember the very kinds of people and models of power that men like Bad Empanada unironically worship; i.e., behind their own "it's just a joke" veneer/unironic rape accusations they levy against those they harm, DARVO-and-obscurantism. To it, they are just as gross, the state-in-small sucking on their victims for state hegemony. They'll call us "degenerate," all the while, but enact state policies and legacies to conduct state kayfabe and vampirism; i.e., that harms all the usual victims in duality through stolen power. Don't believe them/accept such canonical framings; show them your Aegis to camp, thus reclaim such language and its power! Like a gladiator fight, the potential for harm remains; the ability to play with "harm" in quotes grants us power to navigate the machinery normally causing harm: to deflect it through play that—no matter how monstrous it seems—can't harm us. Such cops-and-robbers vaudeville isn't to uphold cops, but speak to the confused spaces/positions that state-mandated aliens occupy and subvert arbitrarily in and upon themselves, onstage and off. Give 'em hell!

Footnotes

[1] Hogle's counterfeit ties to Western models of power that tyrants around the world hauntologically imitate, meaning anachronistically but haunted—as I and others argue—by state power (re: spectres of Caesar). As I write in "Replying to Jon Barbas":

Many of the most privileged are also the most fragile; i.e., white straight Americans breaking down the moment you challenge their beliefs. Often this happens by showing them their own hypocrisy (and beneficiary status); i.e., under imperial models—a conflicted state of mind/existence I call "mirror syndrome" furthering abjection to deny one's cop-like role; re (from Volume Three):

Per Radcliffe, rape and police abuse is a potent aphrodisiac (re: "Radcliffe's Refrain"), hence where shadows are both invented and power is found by demasking such fiends; i.e., what canonical Gothic uses to hint at police abuse, only to tokenize us through the same gaslight (source: "'Real Life': Toxic Love and Criminal Sexuality in True Crime," 2025).

In turn (and per Radcliffe's refrain), such things are scapegoats to banish but also ghosts of the counterfeit to quickly summon and banish from behind Black Veils pulled aside, mid-inheritance:

In the Gothic from the later eighteenth century on, as David Punter has shown, "the middle class" often does what we have just seen Leroux do in Le Fantôme: it "displaces the hidden violence of present social structures, conjures them up again as past, and falls promptly under their spell" with feelings of both fear and attraction towards the phantasms of what is displaced (Punter, 418). The Gothic, well before Leroux adopts it, enables a growing bourgeois hegemony to be both haunted by and distanced from the "hidden barbarities" that have helped make it possible (Punter, 419)—and hence the repressed uncertainties it feels about its own legitimacy (as in Abraham's "phantom")—by projecting such anomalies into the horrors of apparently old and alien specters, buildings, and crypts (source: "The Ghost of the Counterfeit: Leroux's Fantôme and the Cultural Work of the Gothic," 2002).

In other words—and per Hogle unto myself—power in the West is largely faked and has been out from the start: "Hogle argues that modern Gothic is grounded in fakery. [In turn,] Hogle's observation of the history of The Castle of Otranto forms the basis for understanding the concept of counterfeit as a result of the abjection process" (re: West, 2023); but Gothic, especially from the middle-class side, remains haunted by its own betrayals unto rising feelings of terrorism tied to modern Gothic (re: Crawford, 2013), ergo police violence under Capitalist Realism monopolizing monsters for these aims/profit-through-abjection (re: me, 2024). A wild bastard or conqueror of some kind appears From Somewhere Else (a fearful past, below) and must be subsequently "dealt with," generally through heroic, medieval-levels of violence/extreme prejudice:

(artist: Darek Zabrocki)

Per abjection, there must always be a whore to scapegoat, including crooked cops whitewashing dark castles when destroyed (from Walpole onwards): a bastard to expose and expunge, rectifying a wronged power it presumably imitated and usurped. It's state apologia, whose DARVO arguments author "dark" scapegoats (and death warrants) to transfer power from one ruler to the next (often through barbaric levels of poetic force inside the same chronotopes; re: from Bakhtin unto myriad castle-themed power fantasies; e.g., Howard's Conan the Barbarian looting many-a-fortress from unrightful heirs, such as evil wizards, dragon lords, black knights, Archaic Mothers, etc, as "dark" to justify their righteous slaughter, below).

(artist: Frank Frazetta)

The same fakery and trickery can be used by state power or by workers, onstage and off—meaning in dialectical-material exchanges that hug the alien as a dualistic force (an "inkblot").

[2] Excerpts from Patel and Moore's seminal A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things* regarding reproductive labor (sex work or otherwise; i.e., "women's work"):

*A book, I might add, that was given to me by Cuwu; re (from the Poetry Module):

(exhibit 34a1b2b [from "Modularity and Class," 2024]: Left: Cuwu reading my copy of Mike Dixon-Kennedy's Celtic Myth & Legend [1998], their pussy fucked for hours until it became too sore and we had to try anal [note: Before going home, I swapped Celtic Myth for Cuwu's copy of A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things. Said swap was instrumental in writing Sex Positivity as it currently exists; i.e., Moore and Patel's arguments were utterly vital in how I think of Cartesian thought relative to the monstrous-feminine as harvested by capitalistic forces]. Right: Cuwu inspecting my copy of Robert Ingpen and Michael Page's Encyclopedia of Things That Never Were—one of my favorite books—along with old vintage porno mags Jadis' father inherited from a friend as a joke, and which Jadis wanted nothing to do with after he died. So I gave them to Cuwu.)

The exploitation of such labor (theft is theft, rape is rape) was not restricted to the United States, but also occurred in the USSR

The technologies of employer power in the workplace are so pervasive that they even made an appearance in a place we might least expect: the Soviet Union, where workers themselves—at least on paper—controlled the conditions of their labor. Although much is still made of how distinct the Soviets were from the capitalist West, the continuities outweigh the contrasts. The Soviet model was trapped by the same relations of work and nature. The logic of twentieth-century state communism was stuck in a sixteenth-century ecology. In fact, the Soviets were rather keen on taking all manner of ideas from their capitalist foes, including those of the American time-and-motion expert Frederick Winslow Taylor, which were embraced—and contested—in Soviet industry. Lenin, who had earlier denounced "man's enslavement by the machine" under Taylorism, insisted in April 1918 that "we must definitely speak of the introduction of the Taylor System… Without this, it will be impossible to raise productivity, and without that we will not usher in socialism." […]

and China

Chinese communism went further in transforming relations of work through collectivism, but it was still infused with a strong Promethean streak. As part of his efforts to free China from famine, Mao declared war on the animals that ate Chinese grain in 1958. A two-day slaughter would, he thought, ensure the perpetual flourishing of China's population. Humans were to kill on sight the four major scourges of fleas, flies, rats, and sparrows. Although the f leas were uncounted, the government catalogued "48,695.49 kilos of flies, 930,486 rats and 1,367,440 individual sparrows." Without sparrows to feed on it, the invertebrate population grew rapidly. Insects ate grain unchecked, contributing to the 1959–61 Great Chinese Famine.

leading to various changes in strategy

For anxious capitalists, massive Chinese mortality was less of a concern than the threat that peasants might seize title to the land. In general, the threat of workers' power— under various radical banners—caused capitalists to change their strategies. […] Capitalism, however, could not survive a day without a third moment of work: the appropriation of human reproductive labor, conducted largely outside the cash nexus [emphasis, me]. The global factory and the global farm each relies on a family, on a community of care. Thus a revolutionary politics of sustainability must recognize—and mobilize through the contradictions of—a tripartite division of work under capitalism: labor power, unpaid care work, and the work of nature as a whole. Worker exploitation is bound together with the appropriation of extrahuman nature and the unpaid work of care [emphasis, me].

that ultimately faced hard realities regarding nature as something to exploit by all parties involved (much how states [city- or nation-] have since Antiquity into the present, below):

[…] reproductive labor [is] the work of caring for, nurturing, and raising human communities. Such work is overwhelmingly unpaid because it makes the whole system of wage work possible. Without unpaid work, especially care work*, wage work would simply be too expensive [emphasis, me …] But when we talk of reproductive labor under capitalism, we're referring to a very specific set of arrangements, ones that were rearranged through world ecology and persist today. Under these arrangements, some humans were confined to new political, social, and ecological units—households—the better to engage in care work in capitalism's ecology. Call this the Great Domestication. […] Just as Spanish colonists had bridled at Mayan sexual adventures, so the British demanded allegiance to their own version of sexual order and power, one that created the legal category of woman and set her in the household, the workshop of reproductive labor. But, of course, to use the term workshop is to mischaracterize how housework was viewed. It was considered precisely beyond the domain of wage work, a favor that women did for men, akin to the free gifts that nature offered enterprise. […]

*Ergo sex work, I argue; i.e., the whore and her exploitation (during the pimp's revenge) that requires said workers to rebel; re: in ways that reverse abjection, ergo profit and labor exploitation of nature as monstrous-feminine more broadly (the whore's revenge): the home vs the homewrecker upon which said home (ergo the state) is built.

Any movement—be it openly capitalist or "socialist/Communist" in name (and arguably capitalist in function, to whatever degree that is)—historically exploits "women's work" (re: me vis-à-vis John Duncan; timestamp: 1:39:55); i.e., by taking women's work for granted, therefore advantage of all over the place:

In the discussion of cheap work in the previous chapter, we connected rural and urban economics in the link between global farms and global factories. The availability of proletarian labor was possible only because of the transformation of care work into unpaid work, available as one of Nature's "free gifts"—which, as we have seen, are neither free nor gifted. […]

One radical response to the fundamental devaluation of care work involves a jujitsu pricing move and the demand that housework be paid. As the 1970s Wages for Housework campaign argued, "Slavery to an assembly line is not a liberation from slavery to a kitchen sink. To deny this is also to deny the slavery of the assembly line itself, proving again that if you don’t know how women are exploited, you can never really know how men are." The irony here, of course, is that there's a long history of women who were paid little if at all for their domestic labor: those working under slavery. The United States is not alone in this pattern, with carers from different classes, castes, and indeed nations suffering widespread exploitation in other countries too. And even if payment were a route to recognition, there's much further to go to reach dignity. As Angela Davis put it, "Psychological liberation can hardly be achieved simply by paying the housewife a wage." Yet the insight of Wages for Housework shouldn't be forgotten. To ask for capitalism to pay for care is to call for an end to capitalism [emphasis, me].

This tendency is so pervasive that John Duncan, in his own video, doesn't even mention sex workers at all—leading me to have to call him out for it (re: timestamp: 2:18:02); re: "When the Man comes around, show him your Aegis!" To free the land is to also free labor and sex, therefore all of nature as monstrous-feminine (female or not, white or not)—a breaking of all the monopolies used to pimp nature-as-usual; e.g., of violence, terror and monsters rooted in the ancient cradle of abuse showing capital where it eventually will die during the whore's revenge (re: "Our Sweet Revenge").

(model and photographer: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard; cited: "Meeting Rebels," 2024)

Or as Carl Sagan put it, "To make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe." To that, the "inventors" of Society and Nature are in for a rude awakening (re: Descartes, Bacon and others—see Patel and Moore's section on the Cartesian Revolution, but also state shift; i.e., when Mother Nature [climate change] takes the planet back for good, the Capitalocene laid ungraciously to rest: when Medusa sits on it). To prevent that, we must learn to see women (or those treated like women) as capable not just of intelligence, but of revolutionary action; i.e., building a better world through Gothic Communism (the domain of Amazons and Gorgons); re: through a holistic and shared, intersectional consciousness (of class, culture and race); re: Cuwu (above) was a revolutionary actor (a trans man, to be specific) who thought and read, but also used their sexual labor to further radicalize me. Development is a lifelong battle, continuing long after the present generation has kicked the bucket.

[3] To which I describe the goal of doing so:

To reverse abjection, thus profit and the state, while pushing towards universal liberation and post-scarcity under Gothic Communism. This happens through reclaimed pre-capitalist language; re: the Wisdom of the Ancients (a cultural understanding of the imaginary past) made through workers recultivating the Superstructure (social factors; e.g., art, philosophy and politics), thus reclaiming the Base (material conditions/the means of production) by camping the canon. By comparison, abjection leads to unironic war and rape as a business, which go hand-in-hand with profit since Antiquity into neoliberal Capitalism. Relayed through the ancient languages of the state (sex and force)—and barring hunter/gatherer societies before money and settlements existed—prostitution is the oldest form of labor, therefore labor exploitation and struggle against said exploitation's fear and dogma; i.e., when whores appeared, so did pimps trying to control them. Commonly depicted nowadays in black/white, us-versus-them, cop/criminal (abject) language told in popular stories—e.g., Ellen Ripley versus the Alien Queen, or TERFs punching down against a trans scapegoat during Pax Americana (more privileged witches policing less privileged witches)—we whores punch up against our oppressors kettling us on the same Aegis. As such, I want to interview those functioning legitimately as the Medusa—not as an easy victim to attack (and tokenize/triangulate against different groups during divide and conquer), but as a complicated liberator who fights back, mid-persecution, in the present space and time; i.e., anyone pegged as "other" by cops through modular canards like "criminal," "black," "witch," "alien," "chaotic," and/or "whore," "rabble," etc, which standard-to-token proponents of the state, eager to assimilate, attack with extreme prejudice. Liberation and exploitation share the same space, thus virgin/whore aesthetic through the Gothic mode. The way out of the Labyrinth is inside it, subverting the monomythic violence that regularly occurs between fiction and non-fiction alike (source: "Hailing Hellions Q&A Compendium: Interview Series - Sex Workers," 2025).

[4] A feeling he carries a grudge, concerning; e.g., during a recent (11/30/2025) apology I made in The Kavernacle's comment section;

(source thumbnail: The Kavernacle's "My Response to this Leftist YouTuber saying I am part of the Alt-Right Pipeline," 2025)

i.e., regarding Trash Discourse taking my research versus Bad Empanada and basically seeing red versus The Kavernacle, instead:

Me: Hi, Kav. I was one of the researchers Trash cited in their video ["Nazis Are Recruiting You Using Left-wing Buzzwords," 2025]. My focus was on BE but I wanted to reach out and apologize for how you were treated by them.

To it, I just want to say that I'm confused by the amount of flak you caught in this video. As someone who researches fascism and furryphobia myself—and, indeed, having written entire books on those subjects—I frankly was hoping Trash would focus more on Bad Empanada; i.e., the person whose dossier I compiled and sent to Trash, expecting them to actually use the information inside. I asked them to consult me based on its contents after they approached me, and they never did. They HAD mentioned that Bad Empanada sucks but that you, in their words, seemed less at the epicenter of things: potentially misguided but not really the main issue. Yet, they have a disproportionate amount of smoke for you, not Bad Empanada, in the actual video. It was like handing them a quiver and arrows with Bad Empanada written on them, only to shoot YOU repeatedly with them, instead. I really don't get it, honestly. Like, the argument itself was fine; it just didn't apply to you (even if the "theatre kid" comment frankly pissed me off). And I know that things suck for GNC people, but that's no excuse to punch down at allies/hold their heads underwater even when we're drowning. I'm sorry about that, truly.

Also, I didn't have a chance to respond to this yesterday. I watched it once while juggling dinner and writing an essay about something completely different. So when I woke up today and thought about it more, I was like, "Colonizer accent? Isn't the Kavernacle Irish?" There's other things besides I could talk about. Ultimately, though, I felt like Trash took all their frustrations out on you; re: versus using the ammunition I gave them to use against Bad Empanada; e.g., him straight up calling queer folk, furries and plural people, etc, useless eaters. If anything, I'd like YOU to talk about his flagrant bigotry a bit more, yourself, but I understand that it's hard to do that when you're being attacked, yourself. I would ask for understanding as things are scary right now in America for queer people. But I don't ultimately agree with Trash taking criticisms of Bad Empanada and applying them to you.

Sorry again, and solidarity, comrade!

Yours,

—Persephone

Bad Empanada: This is my stalker! They've written like 10 unhinged blog posts about me (some of which are 100+ pages long), which aside from being completely insane (i.e., they accuse me of virtually r4p1ng them with my twitter posts), also randomly have a bunch of nudes in them. Like, every 2nd paragraph, they show you their genitals. I am not joking. In the email they say they sent out to creators about me, they also include a nude of themselves (no joke).

They also awarded themselves a PhD and think that writing obsessive blog posts about Youtubers is academic research :). I would love to cover the insane stuff they've written on my channel but unfortunately it's impossible because it is literally RIDDLED with P0RN FOR NO REASON so if you show it on YouTube you'd get banned.

(source YouTube comments: The Kavernacle's "My Response to this Leftist YouTuber")

I'm not afraid to critique leftists (e.g., "The Curious Case of Rebecca Watson," 2025) but I seriously think The Kavernacle's not the enemy in this instance, Bad Empanada is; e.g., him calling me his "stalker," anyways—meaning after me having not tagged him in different posts, which he tracked down and responded to of his own accord (eventually leading me to block him, below);

(exhibit 7 [exhibits unique to "Raising Awareness" are numbered according to when I added them, not where they appear]: Source skeet, left: Bad Empanada [and my reply]: October 27th, 2025. Screencaps, right: Bad Empanada's main and alt YouTube accounts.)

i.e., the usual DARVO stuff. Incels gonna incel.

For transparency, this is what I wrote in Trash's comment section:

(source YouTube comments: Trash Discourse's "Nazis Are Recruiting You Using Left-wing Buzzwords")

Thank you so much for the shout-out, comrade! Intersectional solidarity is so SO important, and I'm happy you focus on it, here! Truly, it can feel so scary to see straight men—especially white, European middle-class men on "the Left" (all demographics fascism historically lionizes and seduces)—currently spouting Nazi talking points; i.e., those that capital, fascism and the state used, use, and WILL use to discredit, demonize and destroy minorities (for productivity and profit). Also, I totally agree: intersectionality—both of solidarity and consciousness—ARE material concerns, and seeing the usual paid gatekeepers of revolutionary moments try to exclude the usual victims (unpaid labor) REALLY sticks in my craw. So, again, thank you for citing my work, stressing the struggles I try to address (however long-windedly), myself. That really means a lot!

Solidarity! —Perse

P.S., No worries about my surname! Most folks can't pronounce it, either (unless those people are Dutch)!

(source thumbnail: Trash Discourse's "Nazis Are Recruiting You Using Left-wing Buzzwords")

So while I think Trash's overall thesis is correct (re: that bad actors on the Left are undermining its values by refusing to intersectionally confront their own bias/tendency to treat slurs like activism), I also think Trash shot themselves in the foot; i.e., by misapplying my research on fascism and furryphobia to The Kavernacle, thereby requiring an apology from me to someone said research didn't target.

(source thumbnail: Persephone van der Waard's "Essay 9.25: Apologizing for Misapplied Research/Asking for The Kavernacle's Help with Bad Empanada," 2025)

To that, I've made a small video (above), summing everything up/for the visually impaired. Said video, while it apologizes to The Kavernacle, actually does so on Trash's behalf per a shared goal; i.e., while defending Trash's arguments/critiquing them constructively alongside The Kavernacle's own strengths/flaws (activism/queerphobia) to hopefully punch up against fascism together. I've shared it with him on Bluesky too (source skeet, vanderWaardart: December 1st, 2025), but if anyone else wants to share it with him, I'd appreciate the help.

[5] For the legal side of things, simply remember

My work is not a criminal accusation [...] but an academically-informed opinion regarding people I think are acting fascist, therefore racist [and sexist, queerphobic, etc]. Opinions, in America, are free speech in the legally protected sense; i.e., something cannot be defamation regarding public figures unless it is demonstrably false—as a statement of fact but also actual malice, which opinions cannot be: the legal standard is far higher for public figures, because "actual malice" is a legal burden of proof that specifically applies, during defamation cases, to public figures. As Cornell Law School writes, "A public figure is an individual who has assumed roles of especial prominence in the affairs of a society or thrust themselves into the forefront of particular public controversies to influence the resolution of the issues involved [emphasis, me; i.e., regarding Bad Empanada's essay work and my critiquing of Bad Empanada as a public figure]. Public figures also include individuals who have achieved pervasive fame or notoriety [which I think is safe to say, in Bad Empanada's case]. Whether a party is a public figure is a question of law for the court. Public figures who wish to recover for injury to reputation must establish that the defendant acted with actual malice. Actual malice requires clear and convincing evidence that the defamatory falsehood was made with knowledge of its falsity or with reckless disregard for the truth" (source: "Extended Disclaimer About This Piece as SFW and My Sources Critiquing Public Figures through Free Speech" from "White Moderates Still Don't Challenge Fascism," 2025)

Rather than confront my arguments on their own merits, Bad Empanada has chosen to wrongfully defame me to a criminal degree; i.e., by falsely accusing me of criminal activities, he and his using hate speech to silence my investigative work concerning him as fascist; re: according to my researcher's opinion employing free speech while defending myself (and other minorities) from ongoing abuse. By attacking me, Bad Empanada is deliberately interfering with our work; i.e., said work aims to prevent rape by raising awareness to reverse abjection (re: Kristeva; see: "A Note About Abjection and Reversing It during Rape Play" from "Nancy Drew Syndrome," 2025). By wrongfully targeting my friends and I using hate speech, Bad Empanada wants to halt said work in its tracks. He's bent on slandering me for investigating him in entirely valid, ethical and legal ways.

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My name's Persephone van der Waard; I have my MA in Gothic English literature and independent PhD in Gothic poetics and ludo-Gothic BDSM (focusing partially on Metroidvania), and I am the author of the multi-volume, non-profit book series, Sex Positivity vs Sex Coercion, or Gothic Communism—its art director, sole invigilator, illustrator and primary editor (the other co-writer/co-editor being Bay Ryan). A rape survivor/granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor and Dutch Resistance member—and someone anti-war (as a business), anti-Zionist and anti-racist/anti-white-supremacist who specializes in tokenism (e.g., TERFs, SWERFs, and fascist feminism)—I'm a MtF trans woman, Tolkien and Amazon enthusiast, former YouTuber, anti-fascist, loud critic of Marxist-Leninism/state vampirism, atheist and Satanist, poly/pan kinkster with multiple partners, erotic artist/pornographer and anarcho-Communist; i.e., under my brand of Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism as a holistic, intersectional discipline: one devised in 2022-2023, and which my friends and I currently achieve together. / Originally this blog explored my love of movies when I was cis-het; now I use it to write about the Gothic—horror, but also sex, heavy metal, and videogames in a queer way (especially Metroidvania).

I take donations for my work (which goes towards helping sex workers, trans people and other minorities). I currently take payment on PayPal, Patreon, and CashApp, etc; all links are available on my Linktr.ee. Every bit helps!

Regarding Formatting Issues for Blogposts (Older than October 2025): Recently Josey Howarth helped transfer my old blog from Blogger to WordPress, which—while vital for security reasons—altered their formatting. On a phone screen, the posts are mostly readable, but look slightly "jank" on computer screens. Many also contain outdated "About the Author" sections—meaning inside the posts-in-question, alongside the blog website "footer" (as added by Josey after the transfer). Such things are temporary. Eventually we plan to overhaul their visual design, remodeling my blog and website (thus fixing the issues in the question)!

Skeets by vanderWaardart (18+)

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