This article criticizes YouTuber and activist Rebecca Watson for being moderately transphobic; i.e., specifically due to what I call "Nancy Drew Syndrome" or acting like a white progressive cop[2] (therefore moderate): while furthering abjection* or us versus them versus trans educators like me (see: "A Note About Abjection and Rape Play"), but also other minorities harmed by the US government. That doesn't mean Watson hasn't spoken up for trans rights, in the past; she certainly has. She just isn't, in my opinion, critical enough of the powers-that-be who harm minorities (e.g., Joe Biden, but really the whole establishment). To it, I'll try to be as fair as possible, here, but also won't pull punches while getting this off my chest. Sex work is work, asshole, and trans women are capable of critical thought.

*Us versus them/alienation and fetishization, per Julia Kristeva; i.e., as something to further or reverse, mid-vampirism (see: "Concerning State Vampirism," deeper in).

(source: Adam Savage's Tested's "Rebecca Watson on Women in Geek Culture," 2014)

For example, I agree with the premise that Graham Platner absolutely sucks and that we should critique those who don't critique him enough; i.e., as Watson argues in her video, "Graham Platner is an Embarrassing Liar" (2025):

(source tweet, Maine State Press; October 14th, 2025)

However, I also think his critics (and critics of those critics) aren't above criticism, themselves; i.e., critics of the bourgeoisie with a petit-bourgeoise class character (who scapegoat Platner versus criticize his masters, the American elite and CIA). Such things are often "problematic," then—meaning in ways we should critique, regardless. Having researched TERFs* for years (re: "Regarding Tokenism and Fighting It," 2025) while routinely platforming minority sex workers† other than myself, I can safely say that women can be victims and abusers/aren't mutually exclusive, in that respect. Ergo, in Watson's case—and from one nerdy woman to another—it's possible for activists to be moderately bigoted while apologizing for rape, on a systemic level (which "Nancy Drews" do). Critiquing each other is how we improve and, girl, you're in desperate need of critique!

*And token queer folk/sex workers; e.g., Natalie Wynn (and transmeds; re: "Trans TERFs, NERFs, and Queer Bosses," 2022) and Autumn Ivy aka Wolfhead at Night (a token "Amazon"/enby sex worker punching down at me, a trans sex worker and activist; re: "Toxic Schlock Syndrome," 2025).

†See: the Acknowledgements page for my non-profit book series, but also the Book Promotions/Small-Form Content page for those who appear after series in book form; i.e., when illustrating mutual consent during informed labor exchanges that challenge systemic harm (see: "Illustrating Mutual Consent" in "Paratextual (Gothic) Documents," 2024); e.g., Clockwork Rhxbynn—a trans woman of color—helping my white ass (above) prevent rape through intersectional solidarity as dialectical-material context: our shared exhibits (and solo/couples work, below) serving as de facto (extracurricular) education (sex or otherwise)! The pedagogy of the oppressed—pointedly healing from rape during Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism—is holistic in its polity of whores; i.e., ass war is class war raising class, culture and race awareness—what I call intersectional consciousness while hugging the alien by sex workers testifying to rape (ergo power abuse) more broadly: the Gorgon is rebellion through unpaid labor (care work and sex work), whose intersectionality through Gothic Communism takes many forms!

(artist: Clockwork Rhxbynn)

intersectional consciousness

A new term I coined, one meant to combat various forms of reductionism (class, culture and race); i.e., by building on Marx' notion of class consciousness: combining class with culture and race consciousness (awareness) to raise emotional/Gothic intelligence while synthesizing praxis. Generally synthesis occurs by illustrating mutual consent during informed labor exchanges; re: "At a presentation level, Gothic Communism reduces to one central goal: illustrating mutual consent as an educational device—i.e., one that makes rape of the alien impossible on a cultural level; but doing so requires humanizing the alien through iconoclastic engagement with dogma as something to break (and along with it, Capitalist Realism)" (source: "Brace for Impact: Some Prep When Hugging the Alien," 2024). I would summarize intersectional consciousness inside "Preface: Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism; or, Synthesizing Emotional/Gothic Intelligence through a Sex-Positive Gothic Mode" (2024):

Synthesis is vital to good praxis. For our purposes, synthesis can be adequately summarized as "the cultivation of emotional/Gothic intelligence and class/cultural/racial awareness; i.e., the deliberate utilization of Gothic poetics during the practical application of simplified theory had between activist workers: formulating healthy social-sexual habits to deal with state trauma." But there's still plenty of theory that goes into these habits and their collective instruction/de facto education during ludo-Gothic BDSM. To that, Gothic Communism is "picky" in terms of what it incorporates (source).

I would extrapolate on this idea in "The Basics of Oppositional Synthesis" (2024). However, I wouldn't specifically call this notion "intersectional consciousness" until "Is Metal Racist? Yes, It Is; or, a Trans Woman Critiquing Heavy Metal Philosophy's Good-Faith Response to Andrew Lee" (2025)—months after my book series had concluded (re: on June 1st, 2025)!

Before we dive in, some paratexts:

• Concerning State Vampirism
• Disclaimers/Concerning Censored Nudity and Its Educational Purpose
• Changelog
• Table of Contents

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.

Disclaimers/Concerning Censored Nudity and Its Educational Purpose

"Nancy Drew Syndrome" is part of my Sex Positivity book series, which continues after its June 2025 finale in small-form content; e.g., essays on and interviews with other sex workers, all of whom I credit on my Acknowledgments pages and Sex Work page. This piece doesn't focus on sex work itself (which Watson doesn't do), but widespread exploitation; i.e., in a shared predatory system, "whoring nature (and workers) out" in highly abject ways.

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

Disclaimer Regarding Essay Contents: All opinions are my own; i.e., as part of my research, conducted alongside my book series, Gothic Communism (2023). The material within is written/speaks about public figures and popular media for purposes of (sex) 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). Click here for my entire series disclaimer. 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.

CW: sexism, transphobia, whorephobia, fascism, tokenism, genocide, censored/artistic nudity, and various Gothic themes; e.g., discussions of rape*

*Meaning (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). 

Changelog

Note, 11/26/2025: Cathedrals are classically built and occupied over time. For the sake of further educating my audience to obscure Gothic social theories, I've added a symposium before critiquing Watson; i.e., by expanding "Concerning Abjection" into a symposium, as well as a small "primer" before that responding to community feedback (see: table of contents). —Perse

P.S. (11/27/2025), Said addendums include censored nudity for educational purposes (see: "Disclaimers/Concerning Censored Nudity and Its Educational Purpose").

P.P.S. (11/28/2025), Added a section after "My (Good-Faith) Non-Medical Usage of 'Syndrome'": "Showing Off during Playtime; or, Giving Various Examples of Abjection that Occur under Capitalist Realism (castles and vampires/the nuclear home)." Expanded said section to include different kinds of rape play (11/29-30/2025); i.e., ludo-Gothic BDSM. Said play is obviously important when reversing abjection, but needs to be handled with some degree of care; i.e., to avoid future harm when learning from the imaginary past playing "rape" out in the present. Hence, the additions; i.e., abjection = alienation, including rape but especially rape theatrics (which rape play entails, camping rape as a canonical force blaming the whore)!

Table of Contents

Note: Much of this piece has been expanded on; i.e., from its original November 20th short essay, the addendums in bold font and color-coded. —Perse

• A Note About Abjection and Reversing It during Rape Play (re: Ludo-Gothic BDSM)
• Before We Start (a Primer)
  • A Question of Poetry; or, My (Good-Faith) Non-Medical Usage of "Syndrome" When Reversing Abjection
    • A Question of Poetry
    • My (Good-Faith) Non-Medical Usage of "Syndrome"
    • Showing Off during Playtime; or, Giving Various Examples of Abjection that Occur under Capitalist Realism (castles and vampires/the nuclear home)
      • Broad Strokes: Power in Gothic
      • Power in Gothic: Pimping Nature under Cartesian Thought
      • " Vampires and Castles
      • " A Numinous Racket (towards unpaid labor)
      • " the Promethean Quest and Cartesian Thought
    • The Linguistic Imperfection of Abjection; re: Concerning Medicine (reprise/coda)
    • Abjection Primer: the Basic Process (reprise)
    • " Reversing Abjection and Cryptonymy
  • On Glasses, Nerds and Bein' Mean
  • "Radcliffe's Refrain" (sample)
• Abjection Symposium: Concerning Abjection, Playing with Power, TERFs and Class Betrayal (from a Progressive Cis Nerdy Woman)
  • Food for Thought: Some Older Thesis Work to Chew On
  • On Sexy Nerds, Punching Up/Our Larger Focus When Doing So
  • Abjection, the Basic Process
  • Playing with Power (to Further or Reverse Abjection, mid-Cryptonymy)
  • TERFs and Betrayal in Duality (Good versus Bad Actors)
  • The Big Picture: Fascism, America, and Electoral Politics Tied to Cartesian Thought (a Stage for/to Challenge Bad Actors on)
  • Don't Debate Nazis; or, the Importance of Being Mean
• Critiquing Watson: Essay Body
  • Some Other Things to Remember
  • I Like Watson's Overall Work
  • Nancy Drew Syndrome (as Watson Has It)
  • Punching Down; or, Watson's Moderate Transphobia
  • Explaining My Thought Process
  • Hubris: Watson's Achilles Heel
• In Conclusion
• Footnotes

A Note About Abjection and Reversing it during Rape Play (re: Ludo-Gothic BDSM)

Capital cheapens nature, including sex work, to abject extremes; i.e., the elite suck the lion's share through a straw and reduce the dregs to lifeless garbage it spits into our mouths like baby birds: "moving money through nature." That's what capital does; i.e., as cheaply as possible, according to Patel and Moore's A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things* (2017), and which, I argue, requires abjection to enact and combat: reversing abjection, as I conceive it (re: "Reversing Abjection," written 2022, published 2025).  Our focus, here, is unpaid labor under Cartesian thought (an essay built around my critique of Watson and the STEM fields' queer and whorephobias). Silence, then, is death; to live is to speak and to speak demands exposure (thus danger when exposing ourselves to harm, mid-censorship; i.e., as safely as we can, behind cryptonymic† buffers; "Transgressive Nudism," 2025). To critique rape systemically requires broaching its generational harm through ourselves; i.e., in ways that draw attention to/confront what's wrong "when in Rome," meaning where violence occurs and sex workers reverse abjection "on the Aegis": self-defending through trauma as visually "blunt-force"/tied to and swept up in our legit/illegit (virgin/whore) bodies, their trashy status "bouncing it back" by "backing it up" during ludo-Gothic BDSM (abuse/abjection vs our bodies):

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

*Re: to show and hide at once (more on this, deeper in).

†One of my favorite books, given to me by Cuwu; i.e., workers exchange a great many things when working together—hot, steamy sex, but also books (whores are nerds, and Cuwu was a Marxist-Leninist who radicalized me more than I already was).

Abjection, then, is anisotropic in duality—meaning it (thus power as terrorist/counterterrorist in function) signify different things, when performed; i.e., depending on the direction abjection happens: furthering or reversing through a shared corporal aesthetic, one where flow (of power, knowledge, and material exchange) determine function, not aesthetic! Exploitation and liberation occupy the same social-sexual zones, ones where abjection plays out on and across all registers; i.e., during ludo-Gothic BDSM, aka rape play. Said play puts "rape" cathartically in quotes per the whore's revenge; i.e., against profit, raising intersectional conscious to lower the risk of rape on a systemic level: through a "perfect world," one where nudity (therefore the Gorgon) isn't attacked by puritanical forces (re: "Rape Reprise"). In turn, sex workers reverse abjection with Aegis-like things, and all to protect future witnesses to witness being tampered with; i.e., meaning where whores police whores but also liberate ourselves with trash-like (abject) things: on the Aegis, "building among the storms" (as Porpentine writes in "Hot Allostatic Load" [2015], Federici considers per tokenized accusations/triangulation [ibid.], and I respond to; re: "Policing the Whore," 2024).

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

Bigotry is already extant and forced onto our bodies, their flesh and bone forced to uncover genocide through the knee-jerk responses they cause; e.g., Harmony's ass performing "rape," avenger-style, in so many ways; i.e., a forbidden act of showing and looking at policed property that, when viewed, a subsequent vengeful testimony (the whore's) incites rebellion: through various inclinations evoking a reckoning. For status-quo viewers, though, such provocations (and their paradoxical demands) cannot be tolerated; i.e., these viewers care little for permission or consent, seeing bare transgressive bodies as automatically profligate: a notable invitation for trouble, one that "asks for" rape as a historical-material proposition by police agents administering the charge. Capital rapes by design, policing itself at every stage of rape: before, during and after the main event.

Being a rape survivor* and suffering the guilt and shame of rape in ways I played out in stories (re: Metroidvania and my work on it, above), I coined ludo-Gothic BDSM to help reverse abjection/prevent rape; i.e., minting the concept and its practice with my friends' aid, many sex workers (especially women) experiencing sexual abuse and bullying (the basis of abjection) throughout their lives; e.g., Cuwu and I, in "Healing from Rape" (2024), but also Harmony and many others (re: "Acknowledgments"). Our revenge is turning the abuse we suffer (or bodies that endure said abuse) into a formidable, at-times-oxymoronic and animalistic terror weapon that freezes our would-be abusers solid—and all while enjoying ourselves/teaching the next generation (none of this mutually exclusive, mind you). Success becomes a potent way to spite our foes through joy (re: "Joy Under Fascism," 2025), playing with power to understand its inner workings conducive to good praxis versus bad actors. Without good social-sexual habits, rebellion's dead-in-the water!

*My abuse/survival being a topic I've written extensively about (re: "I'm a Rape Survivor" from "Raising Awareness"), and which we'll touch on here, deeper in.

In keeping with capital, pimps and profit, said arrangements vocalize through puritanical dissent ("what was she wearing?" and "covet thy neighbors wife," etc). The reaction—specifically DARVO, concerning nudity/testimony to reactive abuse—gives the SWERF/TERF away as fascist, once "scratched": "I was attacked by a sex pest, a whore, a criminal"; e.g., Bad Empanada clutching his pearls and calling me "stalker" (and my friends "useless eaters," below); i.e., concerning the entirety of our testimony/what we're testifying to (abuse) using what we got; re: my book series that Harmony poses for, achieving shared testimony through negotiated labor/good-faith teamwork: trying to raise awareness and literacy about rape with "rape" (exposure). But according to bad actors like Bad Empanada, we can only be pests (vermin); i.e., for him—the universal victim—to out and exterminate, incel-style: a modern-day witch hunt carrying out the usual Protestant ethic, furthering abjection. Bait is bait, insofar as we draw out and demask these charlatans (much like a Scooby Doo villain, except with butts). 

(exhibit -1: Top, model and artist: Harmony Corrupted and Persephone van der Waard; bottom, source tweets—left, middle, right—cited: "Raising Awareness" [2025]. Bad Empanada will accuse me of rape/call my friends and I useless eaters, only to have me block him. Suddenly I'm "a stalker" and he "did nothing wrong." What's more, others will defend him, too—in bad and/or blind faith:

[source YouTube comments: The Kavernacle's "My Response to this Leftist YouTuber," 2025]

This will happen ignoring the evidence we compile; i.e., we whores [and similar "degenerate" folk] can't speak for ourselves—are merely things to "ratio," impeach, and excoriate [thus repress, rape and exterminate] with impunity. "Help me, Obi-wan Kenobi; you're my only hope.")

Medusa is the oldest monster in Western canon: a whore/rape victim. In turn, whores—meaning sex workers/unpaid labor (delegitimate, criminalized workers commonly paid under the table)—are the oldest kinds of workers, therefore carry the oldest labor struggles, "in small" (echoes of the Gorgon, trapped between pieces of dead language* but also the Amazons tokenized into cops, Athens-to-America); i.e., as part "of nature," which capital/the state currently pimp as monstrous-feminine (under Cartesian dualism therefore abjection; re: "Nature Is Food," 2024). They siphon this power from care and sex work, the victims suitably castrated through abjection; i.e., when trying to voice our concerns, framed as planetary homewreckers under Capitalist Realism: "To ask for capitalism to pay for care is to call for an end to capitalism" (source: Patel and Moore's A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things). Speedrun that shit; i.e., with your eyes and minds open, your play (rape or otherwise) conducive to universal liberation through intersectional solidarity/consciousness and tactical unity's pedagogy of the oppressed (versus the so-called "hamster wheel" approach—a praxially-inert take on puzzle-solving typical of white straight guys who keep their games "apolitical"; re: "Those Who Walk Away from Speedrunning," 2025)! 

*Aka cryptomimesis or the echoes of trauma between pieces of dead language; i.e., from Castricano's book of the same name (2001), which I describe as follows: "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" (source: "Raising Awareness"). Castricano calls this "writing with ghosts"; I treat it as writing with monsters more broadly—the "dead" metaphors of more recent Gothic castles (from Walpole† to us) but also the Gorgon through spectres of Shelly (versus Marx, per Derrida's 1993 Spectres of Marx and the hauntology process it describes [referring to Marx's famous line, in 1844: "A spectre is haunting Europe"]: trapped between past and present as "retro-future," or "haunt" + "ontology").

†A treasure trove on par with/echoing Walpole's real-life Strawberry Hill House, but also being made up; or, as Hogle puts it: "Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto of 1764 is still accepted as the "father of the Gothic novel," yet most observers of this novelette see it, with some justice, as a curiously empty and insubstantial originator of the mode it appears to have spawned" (source: "The Ghost of the Counterfeit in the Genesis of the Gothic," 1994). Yet, he's a bit too psychoanalytical; i.e., too much Freud/unconscious desire, not enough dialectical-material analysis; re: "Gothically immature," as I put it, requiring a material critique with the social to be mature!

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

Gothic concerns the decay of mastery and transfer of power through partial obscurity. There's delicate and sledgehammer approaches to consider when pushing back, mid-abjection, then—the prevention of rape not merely for individual human workers but the whole world spiraling towards state shift (climate change): the Big Whores' revenge on capital/the Capitalocene for raping the Earth repeatedly (an overlap not just of ass and class war but environmental concerns). The idea is do push back "in small" before Medusa "goes feral," thus blind in her punishment of mere mortals. Except exchange requires abjection, and exploitation and liberation "share the mirror." So what's a whore to do? Fight back, of course! This includes by having revenge when seizing the means/enjoying ourselves through said teaching process. Sex work is work, but also a tool to learn from: to fear and respect nature as something that can only be abused for so long.

Sooner or later, we have to speak out; i.e., vainly reversing abjection by using whatever we grow, ourselves (re: butts, but really any body part "seizing the means"). From Base to Superstructure, capital sucks power vampirically towards the owner class (the pimps of state): "Capital is dead labour, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks" (source: Marx' "Limits of the Working-Day," 1867). By comparison, Gothic Communism is holistic—pointedly a wholly intersectional, campy and socio-material endeavor (re: "Making Marx Gay," 2024)! Ass war is class war during the whore's revenge, "clapping back" Numinously per Promethean Quest using abject materiel: sex-as-terror-weapon, achieving land back, labor back, sex back (all things we'll unpack deeper in)!

(exhibit -1 [excerpts from "Silksong Symposium," 2025]: Top-half: artists, left: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard; right: Merv the Cat—timestamp: 3:29. Bottom-half: Angel Witch.

Everyone loves the whore because she's a monster to control for different aims; become the one they fear for different reasons (e.g., girls shit, swear and fuck whoever they want), making the state (and its proponents) afraid of workers; i.e., by using sex, drugs and rock 'n roll's unlawful carnal knowledge (unpaid labor) to break Capitalist Realism, thus prevent state shift "on the Aegis" [...] embody that maxim—your bodies a veritable fortress to paradoxically wage war from/with [...] play = thought, a system to reclaim through its implements [...] Full moon? Make it an eclipse—a space station with stealth but also firepower whose magnitude their shields can't resist! "Pew! Pew!" goes the Numinous booty! [source].

Not everyone can openly do sex work, of course. But those who do shouldn't be discounted, either [many are far more oppressed than you are]! Through far from silly or dumb, it can seem that way to oblivious onlookers; i.e., "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing" while cryptonymically exploring deeply serious things. That's what ludo-Gothic BDSM is all about!)

(source)

To this, "Curious Case" doesn't focus solely on Rebecca Watson (a nerd/geek who doesn't do sex work, to my knowledge); it employs the alter-ego language of nerdy whores with nothing to hide. Here and elsewhere, such baddies holistically explore the poetic history and application concerning Julia Kristeva's abjection process (The Powers of Horror, 1980)—one whose furthering boils down to "us versus them," and often in vengefully Freudian, monstrous-feminine language like the Gorgon, Amazon or witch; i.e., as "femme forte/fatale" tied to rape, pointedly their refusal to be victims by terrifying the usual suspects into inaction:

When Perseus slew the Medusa he did not – as commonly thought – put an end to her reign or destroy her terrifying powers. Afterwards, Athena embossed her shield with the Medusa's head. The writhing snakes, with their fanged gaping mouths, and the Medusa's own enormous teeth and lolling tongue were on full view [the OG ahegao]. Athena's aim was simply to strike terror into the hearts of men as well as reminding them of their symbolic debt to the imaginary castrating mother. And no doubt she knew what she was doing. After all, Athena was the great Mother-Goddess of the ancient world and according to ancient legend – the daughter of Metis, the goddess of wisdom, also known as the Medusa (source: Barbara Creed's The Monstrous-Feminine, 1993).

(artist: Caravaggio)

This involves reversing abjection as a process (re: "Reversing Abjection," written in 2022 but published in 2025 alongside my extensive scholarship on Amazons/the monstrous-feminine); i.e., by utilizing such poetry ourselves, "on the Aegis": "on" meaning rape play aka ludo-Gothic BDSM as I coined it and "Aegis" meaning the paralytic, apotropaic function that Athena's mirror shield classically gives: always anisotropically in duality during paradoxical exposure under dialectical-material scrutiny (not psychoanalysis, which I absolutely hate; re: Freud, but also Creed, to some extent).

Furthermore, such defensive and offensive nudity operates classically per Amazons and Gorgons incorporating abjection during public nudism (and whose asexual performative elements we'll touch on, deeper in); i.e., mid-Amazonomachia as half-real (on and offstage); e.g., Samus and her bikini (above) and Angel Witch's colossal curves (and boobs, below) "wounding" sexist (wo)men similar to Medusa's severed head, thereby turning would-be abusers to stone (conditioned to freeze, vaso-vagal-style, when seeing something tied to rape*)! Nothing is more policed than sex (through force), so that is where our conversations "drop anchor": rehumanizing the "fruit" of the harvest; i.e., by using the same dehumanizing (monstrous-feminine) language in reverse (re: "Nature Is Food"). Capital and the Protestant ethic historically demonize whores to Promethean extremes; so do states under Cartesian thought (e.g., the USSR and Mao's China; re: "Raising Awareness"). Far from weaken us, though, the state turns us into objects of power they want; i.e., by highlighting what the state historically needs to "cheat Death": a Great Whore who happily says, "I can live without you, not the other way around!" It's not just a shield, then, but black-mirror memento mori to scare the elite with (on Promethean Quests/with the Numinous, which we'll unpack deeper in)!

*Under singular (therefore dogmatic) interpretations; i.e., the tradwife or SWERF approach, the care worker—usually a cis woman—policing the sex worker of variable genders: so-called modesty or purity arguments, punching down.

(artist: Angel Witch)

In short, Medusa (and all her likenesses) are a double-edged sword; i.e., conduits of power for power exchange, which dialectically-materially determine by direction to ward off "evil," aka harm (re: apotropaic and anisotropic). So while rape is extant and bound to a raft of shameful bigotries, biases and stigmas under capital, no monopoly exists concerning its overall language of violence, terror and morphology* the state historically abuses: what the Gorgon (the OG whore, therefore victim) classically embodies to ward off rape. Workers do so "in small," utilizing the same Gorgon poetics to reverse abjection/victimization; re: with what Creed calls "her terrifying powers" but taken, by me, to vastly intersectional, multimedia extremes (more on this during the abjection primer and symposium). We're not telling the whore's tale to induce police violence (re: "Policing the Whore") but venerate her alien status through Gothic maturity

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 (source: "Paratextual Documents").

(artist: Missuscrim); cited: "'Men of Reason Suck'; or, Ghosts of Freud," 2024)

while cutting to the chase/the heart of things, mid-revival; i.e., by reclaiming such things from capital, the state forever blaming "the whore" by pimping nature out as token monstrous-feminine (which, again, we'll get to when dissecting Cartesian dualism; re: the primer and symposium)! We dance among the ruins, inside the carnival.

*The monopolies of state action, alongside its trifectas and qualities of capital (re: "The State: Its Key Tools" from "Paratextual Documents").

†And those of any bad actors; i.e., SWERFs (not ace people) who melt down ignominously "on the Aegis," repulsed by/allergic to discussions expanding sex worker rights: as radioactive, in their eyes (which we can highlight during the crash out)! Sex work is work, you wads!

Before We Start (a Primer)

"Before We Start" precedes the abjection symposium/essay body. In doing so, it gives a few disclaimer-y things to bear in mind, plus a "primer" on abjection/the monstrous-feminine that our symposium will unpack further (re: owing to Kristeva's and Creed's infamous ideas being rather obscure, outside Gothic academia). The latter builds on the former, so make sure you have a good grasp on it before proceeding (otherwise my arguments will be hard to follow)!

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

Also, I'm a trans woman, rape survivor, and sex educator/massive nerd—one whose PhD and subsequent book series tackle rape prevention, but especially through Gorgons/Amazons (the monstrous-feminine) as whorish teaching devices; i.e., embodied by me and my friends' sex work, but also our artwork lovingly "reviving Medusa" (above). In doing so, this ensuing "primer" and symposium each feature some censored nudity. They do so to better illustrate reversing abjection, thereby preventing rape academically through GNC sex work; i.e., while illustrating abjection as a poetic, socio-material process: through sexy artwork bearing out pornographic qualities breaking Capitalist Realism (re: Fisher, 2009) "on the Aegis" (that is, while reversing abjection; re: the concept of criminal alienation [us-versus-them] we're priming before the symposium)!

A Question of Poetry Responding to Feedback; or, My (Good-Faith) Non-Medical Usage of "Syndrome" When Reversing Abjection

(artists: Peter Corriston and Dave Heffernon; cited: "Toxic Schlock Syndrome")

I wrote this section following some valid, good-faith criticism; i.e., received regarding my Gothically poetic usage of the word "syndrome," which I wish to include, here (as to encourage good-faith dialogs that welcome criticism from oppressed groups):

My critic: This looks awesome, just one critique though—I think calling it Nancy Drew "Syndrome" is kind of ableist. Syndrome generally refers to a disability, disease, or mental health condition. / Bigotry is never a mental illness, it's the result of anti-social conditioning.

Me: I conceptualized it in a more poetic sense, like a social disease or society being "sick"/toxifying [e.g., Anthrax, above]. It's something that often comes up in Gothic and social theory, which isn't strictly medical; e.g., a zombie apocalypse and the various genocidal symptoms/comorbidities attached to it, or sodomy fears tied to sexual disease nonetheless having social aspects per the process of abjection. / I'll make a note/disclaimer of it, though, as you raise an excellent point.

First, let's outline my poetic approach; i.e., the thing being critiqued, abjection, ultimately a question of poetry that many sex workers, not just me, rely on: while humanizing their alien, medically fetishized, and notably monstrous-feminine* elements, "on the Aegis."

*Meaning anything the state attacks through its usual trifectas, monopolies and qualities of capital (re: "The State: Its Key Tools").

A Question of Poetry

I'm not a medical doctor in the slightest, but do use medical terms like "syndrome" in Gothically poetic ways; i.e., when reversing abjection during ludo-Gothic BDSM as I coined it—largely concerning camp and rape play for purposes of radically transformative irony (re: "Concerning Rape Play," 2025). Such poetry can involve medical terms/aesthetics, diverging these from their clinical usage without fully discarding it (e.g., "Medicine," above 2024). My doing so, here, doesn't discourage the strictly "medical" utility of these terms, but does encourage critical thought while including medicalized terms (and persons) in unconventional ways (re: rape play and the monstrous-feminine; e.g., monstrous nurses illustrating the unequal, fetishized power had between hospital staff and patients, above). To it, exploitation and liberation share the same spaces onstage and off, ergo the virgin and the whore, the housewife and the homewrecker, the cop and the criminal, etc. Such repetitive, holistic poeticism might seem alien, even downright Sisyphean to some, but it historically belongs to a linguo-material process queer folk historically align with (often under duress); i.e., much of queer language being poetic before its medicalization* by state forces, retaining medical elements that regress hauntologically into a medieval poetic framework (e.g., "homosexual" in 1870 and "transgender" in 1965; re: "Understanding Vampires").

*As I understand it; i.e., "Understanding Vampires" (2024) vis-à-vis Broadmoor's "Camping the Canon" (2021) and Foucault's A History of Sexuality, Volume 1 (1980).

In any event, I often receive feedback from disabled and disordered/neurodivergent folk, thus like to include their criticism (ergo voices) in my own work collectively challenging abjection; e.g., "Slurs Aren't Activism" (2025) accepting criticism towards me from a PwNPD; i.e., concerning Bad Empanada's bad-faith usage of the word "narcissism," him punching down at trans women and PwNPDs in ways I addressed while taking criticism:

Slur functionality is partially a matter of poetic context, ergo question of relative intent (concerning abjection). Even so, it can present as a slur regardless of the poetry involved. Here, though, my poetic usage of "syndrome" isn't used like a slur (to cause harm), but in the aforementioned "Gothically poetic sense" reversing abjection: to encourage critical thought despite not being medically accurate (as the Gorgon predates modern science). As such, I don't endorse anything outmoded that leads to harm in slur-like ways, but rather seek to prevent harm; i.e., by thinking in formerly medieval forms I don't literally endorse; e.g., "courtly love" and the medieval language of duels and psychomachy being useful; re: during ludo-Gothic BDSM, achieving calculated risk. Doing so happens while healing from rape; i.e., by injecting performative irony into the equation, thereby placing "rape" in quotes; e.g., bondage and similar "torture dungeon" aesthetics that camp Sade's unironic varieties through "battle":

Again, any and all share the same spaces for play and always have. So do slurs and things that seem like slurs; re: to medically incorrect extremes, but also older physiologies (therefore psychologies) that such barbarities psychosexually evoke. For example, despite "the humors" and "heat" being medically outmoded terms, we can play with such things poetically and come to our own social conclusions; i.e., through poetic preference* of different kinds with the Amazonian (monstrous-feminine) language of trauma, play and memento mori that I enjoy being mere linguistic tools (above). I purposefully have calibrated said tools to communicate enormously complex ideas—meaning in Gothically poetic shorthand, such "kayfabe" steeped in paradox: to better educate/acclimate onlookers but also participants to the complexities that human language historically bears out!

*A preference (and application) that—for me and many other nerdy sluts—is the Gothic (and its good actors; e.g., Nyx, below):

(artist: Nyx)

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 (source: the abstract to my book series, Gothic Communism).

Even so, I'm still writing this addendum based on feedback I received; re: "I think calling it Nancy Drew 'Syndrome' is kind of ableist. Syndrome generally refers to a disability, disease, or mental health condition. / Bigotry is never a mental illness, it's the result of anti-social conditioning." Keeping said feedback squarely in mind, my usage of "syndrome" remains good-faith (and that of my friends and their approach to things; re: Nyx loving fantasy and heavy metal, but also the natural world she feels a strong bond with, below).

My (Good-Faith) Non-Medical Usage of "Syndrome"

(artist: Nyx)

My approach is good-faith. Even so, the poetic, linguistically holistic indiscretions that historically emerge occur through the complex demands when outlining issues of capital; i.e., operating as normally disguised and which demand, in turn, the uncanny ability to describe, in some shape or form, what has occurred (and will occur again): disturbing indications of something being amiss, wrong, the matter, off, unheimlich, "Abby Normal," etc, and on a societal level or in connection to society being critiqued as "sick" (as we shall do of Society in Cartesian terms, deeper in). Here, "disease" doesn't offer a strictly medical diagnosis, but metaphor comparing two unlike things using medical language; i.e., to make a larger point, regarding society as "sick" with fascism (which shares the same "kayfabe" stages with Communism, mid-panic; e.g., Red Scare, below). It's a "pathogen" or "virus" in the looser sense of those (and similar) words. All occupy the eclipse; i.e., as a concentric, half-real place: across fiction and non-fiction!

By extension, "syndrome" as I apply it to Nancy Drew*, deliberately seeks "apocalypse"; i.e., for uncovering hidden trauma, generally by using poetry that camps trauma to help generations heal (as "vampires" categorically do, above and below): the broader language of power and death, but also undead feeding and trauma tied to demonic exchange. Such Promethean "black mirrors" aren't exclusively bread and circus of a "Faustian" sort. Instead, they help worker minds see beyond state shadows using shadows, themselves; i.e., allowing for radical transformation, workers turning into mighty things, mid-Amazonomachia. Whatever corporations steal and sell back to us, for example, we can take and camp among ourselves. Canon = abjection and Gothically immature; camp = reversing abjection; re: achieving Gothic maturity through poetry and play concerned with "mad" people, places and things "duking it out" (and generally through suitably trashy hyphenations of sex and force—generally sex, drugs and rock 'n roll tied† to bread and circus).

*Or Wolff's virgin/whore, in "The Radcliffean Gothic Model" (1979).

†People love the whore, including what she embodies: "fucking to metal" meaning so many things when reversing abjection by using whatever's on hand (e.g., metal and sex, but also radical gender expression, below).

Nothing is sacred, nothing is forbidden, the Gothic swimming in taboos, but also guilt, stigma, bias, fear and so on to highly operatic degrees. One is good-faith (camp), mid-abjection, the other is not (canon), and Gothic is both canonical/campy in ways that Gothic Communism seeks to utilize; re: when camping the canon. Furthermore, such matters (of any faith/actor) are often imperfect, "fuzzy" to a tremendously messy degree. I could just say that and carry on to our medicinal coda, but I'm feeling instructional/adventuresome. Let's show off the messy side of abjection, then get back on track (concerning the medical side of Gothic, touching on medical abuses through abjectly poetic language)! "Are ya ready, kids!" Let's have some fun!

(artists: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard; cited: "Returning to Volume One, Two Years Later (give or take) after Five Books; or, Cuwu's Hand in Forming Ludo-Gothic BDSM," 2025)

Note: Past players aid the process; e.g., Cuwu and I, our past fun as trans people—foundational to Gothic Communism and ludo-Gothic BDSM as I authored them, above—recruited once more, here, like golems unto service; i.e., Marx' seminal "tragedy and farce" (re: "The Eighteenth Brumaire," 1852) followed by camp as a reliable third alternative: "the tradition of all dead [whores] weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living." Again, our spectres aren't strictly "of Marx" (re: Derrida), but of Mary Shelley revived by our past-future selves; i.e., being whores for hauntologically transformative aims we leave behind: making Marx gay by honoring his love for Gothic things by aiming for universal liberation during intersectional consciousness! —Perse, 11/29/2025

Showing Off during Playtime; or, Giving Various Examples of Abjection that Occur under Capitalist Realism (castles and vampires/the nuclear home)

I explained Kristeva's abjection under Creed's monstrous-feminine earlier, but shall reprise the basic process deeper in. Before we do—and before we stress the imperfect, "fuzzy" nature of poetry (and human language more broadly)—I want to give some examples of abjection to play with. All roads lead to Rome; for now, just remember  abjection = us versus them. Furthermore, abjection = play insofar as people learn through play to abject; i.e., by playing dialogically with power-as-argument: how to play as baked into the game, thus the performance (and power) as largely fake; i.e., performed in highly plastic ways with highly paradoxical rules (re: "Notes on Power," 2023). Therefore, to interrogate power (as something to learn about/with), you must go where it is, and generally by reifying it as "past," during ludo-Gothic BDSM (re: "Interrogating Power through Your Own Camp," 2023): a midden of derelicts/found documents, one whose liminal space/awesome nightmare home magically arrives to help dreams come terrifyingly true! A world beyond capital, built on its bones by the skeletons in the closet (exiting the closet, but I digress)!

(artist: Zdzisław Beksiński)

This where things quickly get messy/complicated; i.e., the Gothic hauntologically stresses "Numinous" as a fundamentally alien force found repeatedly on Earth—one whose perceived, unreal divinity leaves an endless train of wreckage in its wake (castles of castles of castles [above]—what Hogle calls the "narrative of the crypt"; re: "The Restless Labyrinth: Cryptonymy in the Gothic Novel," 1980): something found without explanation, "the cart before the horse." It becomes something to "show off," teaching among the fuzziness: forgoing "more matter, less art" in the Marxist sense, but embracing Hamlet's proverbial "method to the madness"; i.e., in dialectical-material, Gothically "mature" ways tied to the late medieval past (the Renaissance straddling the Dark Ages and Enlightenment); e.g., virgin/whore syndrome isn't a medical diagnosis or pejorative label (slur), but a social critique through retro-future poetics: "nostalgia is the enemy of reason, but there is something enticing about its form." "Fluency," then, speaks paradoxically to what dies, only becoming new again, once found and revived!

In other words, I "missed it" and felt spontaneous; i.e., to such an adventuresome, necromantic, spicy degree as to add a whole entire section after "My (Good-Faith) Non-Medical Usage of 'Syndrome'" but before "Abjection Primer: the Basic Process": "Showing Off during Playtime; or, Giving Various Examples of Abjection that Occur under Capitalist Realism (castles and vampires/the nuclear home)." To it, I illustrate "usage" by "showing off," followed by disclaimers and theory.

(artists: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard; cited: Challenging the State's Manufactured Consent and Stupidity (with Vampires; feat. Cuwu)")

Speaking of "showing off," let's give some examples before reprising abjection's imperfection; i.e., as a linguo-material process, juggling medicinal and social-sexual concerns with past forms achieving dialectical-material aims. Here, we'll start broad (Cartesian thought pimping nature) before going concentrically inwards (evoking Aguirre's infernal concentric pattern, endemic to such stories including Metroidvania; re: "Geometries in Terror," 2024): focusing on one specific, arbitrary type of abjection (castles and vampires but also vampire aesthetics, above), then broach the Numinous and Promethean Quest as endemic to abjection/extant under capital (and its bad-faith vampirism)!

Note: When I say "arbitrary," here, this owes to the Gothic's preferential scheme; i.e., when using whatever one prefers to illustrate the Numinous forces at play in our world. I could have picked ghosts but chose vampires, instead. Wherefore, you ask? Well, ghosts certainly can be sexual; i.e., in ways that speak to the social-sexual exploitations endemic to abjection. That being said, vampires are whores known for their castles "among the living"; i.e., of a campy sort, but also Numinous, psychosexual "fleshy" flavor (a palliative Numinous; re: "Interrogating Power through Your Own Camp," 2025). Furthermore, they also consciously embody queerness, passion and persecution; i.e., in ways that merge witchcraft, sodomy and blood libel—a vampire's stormy love yielding complex linguo-material realities (versus ontological ones, with ghosts); re: where whores police whores but also liberate ourselves with trash (to "build among the storms," as Porpentine writes [re: "Hot Allostatic Load"] and Federici considers per tokenized accusations/triangulation, and which I respond to; re: "Policing the Whore").

(artist, left: George Roux; right: Karen B.)

Regardless, the below ideas survey a larger network of research—my research on Amazons/the monstrous-feminine and ludo-Gothic BDSM, but also Metroidvania: starting in 2017 (when writing my master's) and continuing after I wrote my PhD/crystalized ludo-Gothic BDSM (a form rape play inside spaces of rape with characters emblematic of rape to Numinous extremes). For a comprehensive guide on the entirety of this research tied to Metroidvania, refer to my 2025 Metroidvania Corpus. —Perse, 11/28/2025

Broad Strokes: Power in Gothic

In Gothic, the author presents "home" as similar-but-wrong in ways to play with; e.g., Metroidvania and Silksong carry forward larger ludo-Gothic trends of déjà vu—one tied to power-as-Numinous in BDSM ways (cops-and-robbers, therefore monstrous-feminine):

In turn, the SSS focuses on the usual: pursuing Numinous power as the Gothic does, specifically Team Cherry's idea of Gothic; i.e., per a Promethean Quest enacted by Amazons (as Metroidvania historically do). And "If the mountain won't come to Muhammad, Muhammad must go to the mountain!" It's a theme Nietzsche built on with his 1883 "will to power" idea, followed by Clint Hockings' "seek power and you will progress" regarding ludonarrative dissonance (2007), but also the Numinous as something the Gothic fixates on; i.e., its subsequent enchantments disrupting monomyth canon; re: generally on a quest for the Numinous—from Devendra Varma's Gothic Flame (1923) to my PhD (re: "The Quest for Power"), a century apart. In short, Metroidvania and the Numinous (and its destructive, death-to-heroes power) go hand-in-hand, per ludo-Gothic BDSM, and Silksong is most definitely Numinous (source: "Silksong Symposium").

Think of the home as unheimlich, and the investigator given a map to an imperiled inheritance* (often replete with a midden of dead metaphors; i.e., so-called "Gothic" symbols, from Walpole, onwards—above). The same "fraught archive" goes for bodies, meaning the vampirically tempting sort bearing out these architectural hyphenations "Gothic" historically enjoys: "stacked buttresses."

*As David Punter puts it, in The Literature of Terror: a History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day (1980).

(model and photographer: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard; cited: "Castles in the Flesh," 2024)

In turn, worship and play go hand-in-hand, in Gothic; i.e., as a means to learn through the abjection process "chasing the Numinous" (often tied to bodies with a vampiric, vitalistic function framed as "verboten" to workers; e.g., Cuwu's ass, above, both "skinny thicc" [in their words] and virgin/whore—meaning in ways that play abjection out through the paradox* that all workers, however delicate or modest they appear, are whores to some degree†):

The rise of the Gothic novel may be connected with depravity, and a decline of religion. […] In particular, these novels indicate a new, tentative apprehension of the Divine. Monastic life was no longer believed in, but at least it recalled the Ages of Faith and the alluring mystery of their discipline. The ghosts and demons, the grotesque manifestations of the supernatural, aroused the emotions by which man had first discovered his soul and realized the presence of a Being greater far than he, one who created and destroyed at will. 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: Devendra Varma's The Gothic Flame, 1923).

To it, one might as well chase home or homeowner for the same Numinous signature—a (tramp) stamp of the Gorgon, which I call the "perfect domme"; i.e., when identifying a palliative Numinous to chase during ludo-Gothic BDSM, meaning through "mighty mighty" monstrous-feminine forms; re: endemic to Metroidvania frankly describing extent matters, mid-cryptonymy. "Size queen" can mean so many things (size difference, for one); whores—like vampires evoking the Gorgon (or castles, for that matter)—come in all shapes and sizes!

(artist: Rae of Sunshine; cited: "Healing from Rape," 2024)

*The whore's paradox: "demons are maidens and maidens are demons, but both are virgins and whores, and each finds power (and knowledge) according to how the state forbids access, yet access happens anyways; i.e., (de)valued, mid-exchange, thus used to humanize or dehumanize the demonized through performance and play" (source: "Rape Reprise"). Much of this "ass war" lies in/upon their bodies: land back, labor back and sex back tied to said bodies' art/porn as two sides of the same overall coin (re: "Our Sweet Revenge," 2025).

†"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: "Raising Awareness"); e.g., queer folk as normally "pimped out": "Capital and state power historically alienate workers to pimp nature as monstrous-feminine, including queer folk" (ibid.).

Furthermore, such things extend poetically to media and real life, mid-abjection onstage and off; i.e., on/within the same half-real surfaces and thresholds during liminal expression, cryptonymically flashing "power with power" (re: "Transgressive Nudism"); e.g., behind/upon mirrors, below, but also with camera lens/computer screens, mise-en-abyme:

(artists: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard; cited: "Castles in the Flesh")

Home or homeowner, then, Gothic treats power is something to play with, anywhere and everywhere; i.e., through invasion features (and the whorish, barbaric past) tied to a unheimlich or uncanny space but also occupants; e.g., as Hogle and Punter argue:

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).

This forged "antiquity" includes strength in traditionally male/female ways, the whore embodying classic fears of the scorned sex worker pushed onto a barbarian "outsider"; e.g., Hannibal sacking Rome as much as Caesar crossing the Rubicon, but also the Gorgon/Amazon (or some-such fatale/forte monstrous-feminine) the ghost to "get." Furthermore, whatever ghost counterfeits for abjection, "power" assumes infinite forms. Often, these hyphenate mise-en-abyme through body-like castles and vice versa "hoing it up" on the Aegis (e.g., Cuwu and I, above): the Gorgon (therefore abjection) "in small" but evoking Numinous feelings and "derelict" ideas tied to/dressed up as "past" (re: the Wisdom of the Ancients).

(artist: H.R. Giger; cited: "Castles in the Flesh")

Whatever the configuration, form is far less important than function when camping such things; e.g., through a castles-and-vampires aesthetic; i.e., to reverse abjection, ergo Capitalist Realism, through subversive value judgements; re: dialectically-materially hugging the alien, therefore the Big Whore (the Gorgon), in some shape or form. As such, however scary a "scorched earth" feels, it remains calculated risk, mid-abjection and cryptonymy (which a revelation basically is): something to educatively play with, thus arbitrate for egalitarian emancipatory aims (no Omelas whores).

If my copious research into Amazons/the monstrous-feminine is any indication, abjection takes endless forms, mid-duality (far more than I can possibly show here; re: "So Many Monsters, So Little Time" from "Appetizers; or, Paratextual Documents for Volumes One through Three," 2025). Of those, all boil dialectically-materially down to canon vs camp (the original title of my book series). Of canon, the state historically-materially invents abject, oft-supernatural and darkly "magical" arrangements of power to compel Capitalist Realism through copagandistic force; i.e., homewreckers to uphold "home" (the nuclear model and its Cartesian ordering of nature): the house (or castle) threatened by an evil double under Capitalist Realism—generally an ancient barbarian "bastard" or vengeful "whore" of some kind, and whose mighty (divine) status, army and/or traveling vehicle hail from "cradle of civilization" seeking "ancient," death-by-Snu-Snu revenge (the fate of conquered parties "rode hard and put away wet," below): "We've come to be the rulers of you all!" (or as my abuser used to say, "Put your mysterium tremendum* in my Uncanny Valley!" Same difference).

*From Rudolph Otto:

The Numinous, per Rudolph Otto's The Idea of the Holy (1917), is a divine force or numen tied less to the natural world (the Sublime, from Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, 1757) and more to civilization as derelict, dead and alien; re: the mysterium tremendum fascinans, in Otto's words (often shorted to mysterium tremendum, or "awesome mystery") (source: "The Numinous (from Walpole to Me)" from "Silksong Symposium").

In Gothic, rape—like sex, in general—is generally relegated to sites of dangerous play; re: the liminal hauntology of war as "danger disco": "Also something I call the "danger disco," or source of Numinous thrills; i.e., where the hero chases the Numinous during calculated risk: to articulate and interpret generational trauma under state confusion and duress" (source: "Paratextual Documents").

(artist: Owusyr; cited: "A Paucity of Time," 2025)

"Power in Gothic" refers to vampirism at large. And while such things can be camped, danger-disco—meaning when scouting the field, ourselves (e.g., the high adventure captive/rape fantasy* of "orcs and humans" played campily out, above)—state vampirism pimps anything pre-selected for territorial violence, terror and morphological form; i.e., to stamp/stake as vampires (therefore whores). Let's highlight the larger policing of nature (Cartesian thought), then narrow it down to castles and vampires under state vampirism (followed by the Numinous and Promethean Quest)!

*Such statements saying things akin to "Oh, no! Please don't rape me!" to camp our own holocausts. Thoroughly tongue-in-cheek and deeply cathartic, doing so should strive for agency and appreciation for both parties during ludo-Gothic BDSM: by dismantling harmful stereotypes, mid-thrill and with Gothic maturity by skilled practitioners "passing the torch." Context matters, not aesthetic; i.e., while heeding the whore, not blaming them for generations of state abuse. Power doesn't exist "in a vacuum"; it (re)distributes through engagement. So while countless workers live with trauma, they do so in salubrious ways; i.e., where healing from rape happens through play and make-believe, helps not just the players reverse abjection but the audience looking in: to stand in someone else's shoes, however imperfectly (more on this when we re-examine "Healing from Rape")!

(artist: The Maestro Noob)

established through the artwork we make and games that we play as a second-nature mode of altered existence: self-definition as a basic human right, one that is quickly and readily understood at an intuitive level. It becomes a child-like curiosity and teaching that extends into adulthood, carrying Gothic Communism forward through workers [not the state] dictating the Gothic mode; i.e., their cultivating of emotional/Gothic intelligence with ludo-Gothic BDSM's praxial synthesis and [catharsis: the cultivation of daily habits] (source: "Scouting the Field," 2023).

Apart from my work on ludo-Gothic BDSM, refer to "Prefacing Tolkien: to Harmony/Concerning Big Black Dicks" (2025) for more examples of this specific roleplay type; e.g., Harmony Corrupted and her own content (with big black dildos, above); i.e., during classic suggestions of abuse, but hyphenations of sex and force—rape and war things to Gothically synthesize in a sex-positive, wholly liberatory direction haunted by unironic stigmas, biases and outcomes (see, also: "A Deeper Look at Cartesian Trauma in War Culture," "Rape Culture" and "A Problem of 'Knife Dicks,'" 2024).

(artist: Harmony Corrupted; cited: "Concerning Big Black Dicks")

Power in Gothic: Pimping Nature under Cartesian Thought

A stirring in the loins classically presents as "brainless."' Quite the opposite, it can cryptonymically evoke thought dressed up as play of a "garbage" sort (sex as "dirty," especially extramarital sex with martial elements; e.g., the fuzzy language of "conquering" had, often enough, through dark mommy dommes fetishized through an Amazonian Male Gaze, below). A pimp is a pimp, the vampirism of capital tied to Cartesian thought anchored hauntologically to its abuse under state crisis: monopolizing forbidden fruit of a dark, delicious sort!

(artist: Brendan Corris)

Appetizer or entrée, such "echoes" can be silly and/or serious (above and below). Whatever the form (and there are many)—and whatever the objective and subjective elements at work/play—it's the usual battle of the sexes enriching the state canonically at nature's expense: the straight sissy chasing the Numinous (above); i.e., scaring people straight (and nuclear) by evoking the usual man-versus-nature refrain as monstrous-feminine (re: "Nature Is Food"), or what Descartes calls "Society" per Cartesian thought

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 (source: Patel and Moore's A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things).

Gothic plays with rape as a spectre of state harm, scapegoating the Gorgon as GNC and non-white, classically female abuse extending to anything "dark" under the sun; re

Under Capitalist Realism, something is "dark" if it ostensibly moves anything of value (re: power and knowledge) away from the status quo. Generally this darkness is associated with the vengeful imaginary past based on buried historical atrocities, the latter paradoxically twisted by the former to keep control right where it is (among the elite). Anything that challenges this paradigm is canonically framed as dark, evil, profligate; i.e., nature as vengeful whore, which capital takes revenge on through DARVO-style police violence/obscurantism, witch hunts, tokenism and moral panic; e.g., Medusa and her Aegis' forbidden sight (source: "Demons: From Composites and the Occult to Totems and the Natural World," 2024).

Under Capitalism/state models, there must always be a whore to pimp without worker irony/catharsis: "Worker exploitation is bound together with the appropriation of extrahuman nature and the unpaid work of care" (source: Seven Cheap Things). Mid-Capitalocene, such things then map/act out (through cartographic refrains), completing a cycle of exploitation Patel and Moore refer to as "the Great Domestication." The whore is "kept," but remains suitably "wild enough"; i.e., just as Theseus captured and married Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons, against her will, such things involve a degree of play insofar as "rape" goes; e.g., as white women turned into vampires, or women of color turned into orcs (above and below).

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

The fact remains, Pygmalion casts a long shadow—one crafting unironic fantasies of, and the context required, for rape-sans-quotes; i.e., through through a historically harmful process: a lack of agency during power abuse (which rape ultimately is), specifically the power to create and self-define. Reclaiming it (and its Galatean fetishes), mid-abjection, some degree of oscillation always happens between choice and no choice: appropriation vs appreciation. These determine function, insofar as power flows this way or that through warring socio-material conditions: Corris fetishizing Medusa as a pre-made, corporate clone, and Jackie a Cuban friend of mine who said, "make me a badass bitch" (above). There's no monopoly on either emblem, consent sexy for those who seek it to systemic degrees of radical change. And while anisotropic, Gothic poetry suffers optically from state powers haunting the process (and the garbage) with genocide: compelled fetishization through the usual trifectas, monopolies and qualities of capital demonizing nature as "criminal" and "alien," but also "non-white" in different modular* ways (e.g., orcs and zombies sharing some crossover).

(artist: Sinead Rhiannon)

*Such things operate anisotropically and in duality. Bodies with white skin can still be treated partially as "black," even if that applies differently per case. Fat, non-male white bodies, for example, fetishize in spite of any relative privilege and oppression, "fattened up" for different aims; e.g., fascism and reactionaries treating fat workers "like meat," while [white] moderacy aids in said process: "It's simple: we eat the Batman." Yet, fatness is just as much a rebellion to wage, Sinead (above) thinking and performing through faer body to make radically liberatory statements:

In short, Solomon's arguments uphold and demonstrate Capitalist Realism per a medicalized Protestant ethic, one quick to dismiss the entirety of my evidence and largely through a transphobic and fatphobic lens calling us "dubious"; e.g., "ADAB" (All Doctors Are Bad), from A.T.A.C.K. Issue 9 Feb 24 (source); i.e., as part of my trans-woman history working alongside fat people—specifically fat sex workers like Sinead, below—towards fat/universal liberation versus partial clemency (which white moderates attain and uphold, across all registers). Solomon's a pedantic gatekeeper policing Omelas, and silence through selective arguments don't help his case when called out (source: "White Moderates Don't Challenge Fascism," 2025).

Male privilege can exist, too—often intersecting with culture and class, but just as often being used to pimp black men treated as "boy" or "buck." White women (skinny or not) are often raped by white men, but abject this abuse onto black men (and poor people/various minorities through generally penis-havers; e.g., trans women); i.e., the Gothic heroine's perspective generally one of material advantage but social disadvantage (re: "I'll See You in Hell," 2025). While alienation is alienation, performances thereof nonetheless play out by relating to different workers' ratios of privilege/oppression. Any and all concern a gap to cross, one regarding differing levels of privilege and oppression, therefore trauma; i.e., "healing" happening between different survivors "from all walks," in (and across) a larger Gothic mode:

At its most basic level, rape is a violation of basic human, animal and environmental rights enacted through Cartesian power abuse; this postscript concerns the complicated process that healing from rape entails—i.e., its corrupting presence through codified trauma, wherein the surviving of police abuse becomes something to relate to others through Gothic stories that constitute radical empathy as a thing forever out-of-joint: the attempt to empathize with alien experiences to gain new perspective. Such empathy needn't concern both parties equally and its Gothic dialogs concern intense, poetic liminalities still bearing an intense potential for disguise that is haunted by the shadow of police forces; i.e., it is where ludo-Gothic BDSM may camp trauma, doing so through cryptonymy as pushing towards what it cannot always achieve [...]

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, akin to an (at-times) humorous, even trashy gallows theatre rife with dark, forbidden language: sin, vice, violent sex, all-around death, and other taboo subjects discouraged by privileged (and unimaginative) moderates who historically frame the Gothic as a puerile, good-for-nothing backwater while simultaneously suffering from conservative delusions of privilege and/or tokenism (source: "Healing from Rape").

To it, the same 16th century ecology Patel and Moore lay out pimps nature as monstrous-feminine: toxifying the usual victims through selective extermination models treating them like vermin whores (re: "Toxic Schlock Syndrome"); i.e., under Capitalist Realism furthering a compelled Great Domestication—one where nature is food, and myopically patriarchal, copagandistic and token Amazonomachia furthers abjection in decay (re: vampires and castles, but really any semblance of state demise, above). Doing so happens under Pax Americana, white Indians routinely enacting "death by Snu-Snu" versus virgin/whore natives to exterminate (re: "In Search of the Secret Spell," 2024). It's a harvest, its grim, boom-or-bust cycle historically-materially engendering prolific token betrayals, monstrous-feminine scapegoats and state (thus rape) apologia, mid-kayfabe. The state is always hungry for more, its usual DARVO arguments cannibalizing the whore, mid-glut! As Kevin Sanji puts it, "My hungry ass will eat just about anything!" So, too, the state cannibalizes labor by design, ergo itself composed of workers to eat like "pizza" (the disco a cafeteria, in that respect): 

(artist: Zdzisław Beksiński)

Rape is rape; we whores must camp our own rapes, such things sharing the same stage therefore wardrobe as our abusers. In canonical terms, genocide normalizes through the cycle "played out," time and time again, "in small"; i.e., by justifying the same old reprisals, mid-refrain, canon repeating abjection's furtherance (re: "moving money through nature"); e.g., the Belmonts versus a resurrection of the Gorgon, Castlevania: Nocturne's (2023) own "Whore of Babylon" a "rare Egyptian" towards that end. Raised, Sphinx-like, from a seemingly "ancient derelict," Walpole-style, she then invades a "white" castle ("Society") and turns it temporarily "black"; i.e., finger-wagging revolutionary action while valorizing Western Liberalism (and its cops); re (from the Poetry Module's "Back to the Necropolis"):

(exhibit 34b3b3a3: Castlevania: Nocturne falls victim to the usual pitfalls of neoliberal hero escapism, but there remain lots of Gothic fetishes and clichés to consider for actual revolutionary purposes. Even so, these have to be rescued from the usual kill-the-Medusa dreck [fun dreck, but dreck nonetheless]: the Countess.

For one, the show's Great Destroyer—a "black Egyptian" spin [as Castlevania loves to do] on the Elizabeth Báthory legend—ties vampirism to a pre-Western regression; i.e., a 21st century hauntology demonizing Communism as state shift per Capitalist Realism: a vengeful Medusa as daughter-of-Ra, an equation of hysterical "terror" conjured up again. In other words, it's Joseph Crawford's invention of terrorism through French state decay vis-à-vis Napoleon letting British and American forces hold onto power in their own territories and power centers: through a counterfeit, girl-boss death god used to keep the elite in power now much as Radcliffe did [versus Matthew Lewis' queer camp] when the actual French Revolution was underway! In other words, bread and circus.

Fast-forward two centuries, and the so-called Devourer of Light [a black hole exemplified by the Apep-style eclipse eating Ra] is fascist DARVO on the state side of things; i.e., with a Japanese neoliberal [videogame] Shintoism ultimately defending the light, the sun, through a Western cop [our very own Richter Belmont] punching Nazis and Communists conflated per centrist dogma on the show's signature Medusa. This includes their rhetoric, aesthetic, costumes, masks, etc, as canonical monstrous-feminine she-wolves and fags [e.g., Orlock] as expendable bad bitches, their lieutenants, bosses and gods all wrapped up in the same anisotropic scheme for the state. Or as our resident queen's token black Mephistopheles, Doltra, delightfully says, "They're revolutionaries, father. We're here to crush them." She's literally a black Nazi, thus Afrocentrist by virtue of psychosexual, biomechanical decay—a gargoyle, an undead puppet to shock the masses with.

Corporations love to milk and tokenize Nazis through these kinds of paradoxical compromises...)

A sideshow sum of middle-class fears and fascination, Hogle calls this steady Gothic reinvention "the ghost of the counterfeit" furthering abjection*; I call it the liminal hauntology of war[5]. Said retro-future (or canceled future, in Fisher's words; re: "What Is Acid Communism?" 2019) reliably delivers a cataclysm: one to materialize, then navigate heroically in a variety of ways; re (from Volume Zero's "What Is the Gothic?" 2023):

*Re (abridged footnote [1] from "Raising Awareness"): "'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)." It can be camped to reverse abjection (and have the whore's revenge versus profit), but doing so remains dialectical-material, therefore dualistic.

Polities, corporations and churches—these factors are always working in concert to achieve profit; i.e., in some combination of state, corporation and church. [...] the outcome is always the same towards workers: exploitation, because that is what Capitalism is designed to do. Crisis and decay are both the functional gears of profit and part of the larger theatrical tableau.

As part of this masquerade, the black-and-blood-red ghost of fascism is constantly revived in pre-/current/post- flavors to combat the spectres of Marx within the psyches of the privileged; i.e., centrist media commonly reviving the Nazi as something to "protect" Americans and their emulators from [...] while also keeping the same citizenry safe from the ghosts of Communism as a mutual enemy within the state at large. Indeed, fascists are either commonly summoned and scapegoated or dressed up in the antiquated, pre-fascist "vampy" aesthetic ("vamp" meaning "wielding the qualities of a confident, monstrous-feminine seductress") whose signifiers are to be blasted apart by monomythical, status-quo heroes, thus saving the world from the Greater of Two Evils: fascist "corruption" as conflated with Marxist-Leninists and anarcho-Communists in the same breath, but differentiated when it suits the elite, inviting fascists to defend capital from agents of post-scarcity (making the false rebellion of fascists a useful brand of idiocy for the state):

(exhibit 1a1c: Artist, top: ChuckARTT; bottom-left: Arvalis; bottom-middle: Flyland; bottom-right: Pagong1.

Fascism and Communism occupy the same space as "bad omens" in centrist monomyths until crisis demands a clear distinction be made by Pygmalions that defends capital beyond a shared persecution; i.e., fascism is the lesser of two evils because its perennial dark castle routinely crumbles to reveal a shiny white castle underneath, whereas the troubling presence of Communism threatens all of normalized existence: through a dark truth that cannot be cleansed because it denotes the castle [symbolic of the West, of Cartesian thought, of Capitalism] as harmful by design, not because it is "corrupt": ACAB. Indeed, the so-called shadow of "corruption" is common capitalist apologia, often relayed through a "vice character" scapegoat in neoliberal propaganda stemming from early-modern forms [e.g., The Merchant of Venice]. Videogames constitute a popular majority in this field, wherein the boss archetype is a fascist or Communist scapegoat in the same general aesthetic. As such, there remains plenty of room for variation and double standards, enacted and remediated by weird canonical nerds in the Shadow of Pygmalion.

For example, the canonical "phallic" woman is "like a man" in that she is dark, mysterious and penetrative with her fangs and unquenchable desire, but remains the bride of a male, "Dark Father/Dragon Lord" tyrant [an allusion to the historical figure Vlad "the Impaler" Dracul and his patrilineal Order of the Dragon out of Eastern Europe] who holds her under his boss-like thrall; the canonical myth of the female equivalent, on the other hand, is the female-Beowulf who enters Archaic Mother territory—e.g., the place where the Countess [exhibit 41h] or Alien Queen/Mother Brain breed inside a site for abject sexual reproduction: the awesome majesty of her Numinous power offset by a voracious, vagina-dentata maw [what Barbara Creed calls the murderous womb] that both angrily spawns dragons and devours its own "children" blindly who, in turn, are forced to put her down in favor of a male hegemon; i.e., the Jungian slaying of the female chaos dragon to further the male questors "individuation" [itself a myth, given the genocidal commonality of all heroes in heteronormative canon: the knight defends property and the state, often by killing someone else and taking it from a fascist double after said double takes it from labor and minorities—capitalist DARVO in other words: "You're the gaping, always-hungry, self-cannibalizing maw, not us!"].

(artist, right: Frank Frazetta; source: left)

Again, I commonly phrase this poetry as Amazonomachia, or "monster battle." However, this abject spell to fall under—meaning from Punter and Freud for the middle class pimping Medusa, per the ghost of the counterfeit—isn't strictly female. For example, the Belmonts and Dracula are two warring supermen (of a chaste, warrior sort threatening good/evil "impalement" during courtly love, above). Likewise, the universe-in-small they seek to dominate happens through kayfabe-style force of a himbo sort (thus the burly warrior language/cryptonymy of sex, drugs and rock 'n roll that all warrior whores celebrate—Amazons, of course but also knights; re: "From Herbos to Himbos" and "Predators as Amazons, Knights, and Other Forms of Domesticated, Animalized Monster Violence," 2024).

Let's further narrow things down; i.e., by focusing less on "nature" at large and more on undead spaces of vitalistic exchange (re: "feeding" and trauma) but also demonic transformation: vampires and (Gothic) castles, followed by the Numinous racket towards unpaid labor (sex work) and the Promethean Quest (under Cartesian thought) upholding Capitalist Realism, mid-abjection!

Power in Gothic: Vampires and Castles

(artist: Ayami Kojima; cited: "Healing from Rape")

Vampires are basically whores, specifically femme fatales known for their substantial, forte-grade charms' neo-feudal hauntologies (above) : a wild castle appears, piloted by the Gorgon's avatar being curiously "stacked." Such matters are no different, functionally, from a witch straddling her broom; e.g., Margaret Hamilton's "Ms. Gulch" a clever parody of early suffragettes and bicycle face; i.e., to scare the kids straight, or reveal/revel in just how gay they actually are: "How 'bout some fire, scarecrow!" From Hawthorne to us, then, the Puritan ethic postures as "good," doing while functioning through unelected slavers pimping nature as "bad"; i.e., Glinda was the bad witch and Elphaba the good witch, in function—meaning despite the terrorist/counterterrorist aesthetic being visually reversed/dialectically-materially out-of-joint (re: flow determines function, not aesthetic): the "power" of a cyclone, turning Gothic debutantes' black-and-white homes upside-down! "Come to me, my pretties!"

I digress. However "trippy" (fun) such things are for whores, Capitalist Realism frames Communism as a "great whore"; i.e., one to worship, conjure up and destroy in endlessly monomythic ways. Abjection furthers by using neoliberal copaganda (especially videogames) to "blame the whore/working girl" for state vampirism: cosmic-scale bugbears (male, intersex or female) to prop up and topple. Each time, a given regime change overlaps with state shift threatening white (nuclear) models with black planets[4] (climate change but also state crisis, by design). Whatever the form or focus, the canonical function is always DARVO and obscurantism!

In keeping with pirates (and Radcliffe's banditti and similar terror language), we're left with a false pirate flag—one that, whether actually black or not (e.g., the vampire's black-and-red combo, as well as Hamilton's green skin, and purple in comic books codifying evil under the Haye's Code, etc), reliably stands in for Radcliffe's famous Black Veil: echoes of the Numinous being chased/framed as wholly real and completely bogus (the home as sick with teenage "hysterics"). No matter. The bigger the scapegoat, the bigger the "prize" for canon to pimp out (with final bosses acting as Great Destroyers threatening cataclysm, Capitalist Realism personifying it; e.g., the Countess and Lady Dimitrescu, below, from The Darkest Dungeon's "Crimson Court" expansion and Resident Evil Village, 2017 and 2021). That's canon; for campy workers, we parade and celebrate the Gorgon—i.e., in Miltonic, Satanically rebellious ways: "there's some whores in this house!" and everyone loves the whore, especially the Numinous whore whose looks can kill (the Gorgon)! Without her, the pimp would die from boredom; we, from lack of proper tutelage: how to be fuckable (attractive) and badass (fearsome) as female/monstrous-feminine avengers classically are; re: femme fortes/fatales (or "walking vaso vagal," as I put it), capably evoking the pimp and the whore to quasi-regel extremes; i.e., "female/GNC Caesar" and/or Brutus (e.g., Dacre's Victoria, Brontë's Bertha, Le Fanu's Carmilla, and similar examples that rapidly appeared from the 1800s, onwards)!

(artist, left: Wonseok Choi; right: Zoe Volf)

Terror can be used by anyone, Asprey argues. In canonical terms, though, planet = house and house = home, home being threatened by a pirate alien gangster queen (the femme forte/fatale a "bewitching predator" shifting between bait/trap in calm/furious forms, above); i.e., a chosen scapegoat to catch, stake, string up, convert, what-have-you, for "being rude": a previous insider actually older than current occupiers, but treated like a lycanthropically imposturous, perfidious outsider per various state-penned conspiracies/crackdowns (during the Imperial Boomerang and subsequent state of exception; re: Foucault and Agamben, 1975 and 2005). Meant to maintain order in terrorist/counterterrorist language, such DARVO and obscurantism repeatedly mash fascist and Communist kayfabe together ("bumping uglies," as it were): per a centrist monomyth refrain (and Protestant ethic) pimping the Gorgon for its Numinous potential, then giving her an ignominious death (stabbing Caesar)! Vae victis.

A dark mommy domme, Medusa's a thing to fear and fetishize, thus pilot and pimp during mirror and virgin/whore syndrome (ergo Nancy Drew). So do our canonical heroes and heroines (Amazons or otherwise) gladly pull aside Black Veils "cut from the same cloth"—a Numinous peep show/mystery (of power and death, sex and force) to solve by "pantsing" then raping "the dreaded evil" (re: Radcliffe, 1826); i.e., during reactive abuse and draining it: the usual raping of nature for creeping vampirically towards state shift, the ultimate revenge for state harm undeath describes! In other words, capital and state power make the world undead; i.e., by raping it, ergo the monstrous-feminine, without quotes; e.g., Marx' vampire quote, but also Lenin and later Dutt's "fascism is capital in decay" maxim, followed by Fanon: "By a perverted logic, [Colonialism] turns the past of the oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures and destroys it" (source: The Wretched of the Earth, 1963).

To it, the state sees Medusa as a "dirty girl," one who "gets what she deserves" precisely because she reminds her bourgeois jailors what "sanguine" is (e.g., girls shit, fuck, burp, curse, etc). From Athens to us, the state is built on slavery thus rape; ergo, it cannot permit the Gorgon's complete liberation. Instead, she's an Amazonian "show pony" to trot out, then pimp accordingly—a pageant model, killer doll, virgin/whore, bleeding statue (the Catholic miracle), etc, as the oldest traitor and victim alike: no "perfect" examples exist*, its Numinous racket (Capitalist Realism) famously bloody from and with abjection. Blood = sex = power = death to Numinous extremes (what Foucault would call "bio-power" and Red Hook's Darkest Dungeon treats literally as insect politics, below).

*E.g., my enjoyment while working with Hannah Hussein in the past, but critiquing her for her own transphobia (source skeet, vanderWaardart: 11/30/2025) and fence-sitting (re: "Addressing a Stalker Defaming Me," 2025). The same goes for Autumn Ivy and similar Amazons subjugated/tokenized to different menticidal degrees (re: "The Nation-State" and "Toxic Schlock Syndrome"; see: my entire Amazon corpus for more). Exclusion is segregation, Hannah, and we shouldn't hold off on using our "heavy hitters" versus those meriting criticism, mid-Amazonomachia. Whatever the shape, size and aesthetic, the "ancient" past and its monstrous-feminine Wisdom (thus power) needn't be strictly fatal to workers; they can be something to nostalgically reclaim "on the Aegis": the full-moon, lunatic embodiment and subsequent battle of different "badass" ideas, force-of-nature! Everyone loves the whore, the Amazon a kind of whore—tied dualistically to nature expressed through sex, drugs and rock 'n roll, since Ancient Athens (and whose very power the state tries to anisotropically harvest for itself alone; re: "gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss")!

(exhibit 5: Artist, left: Persephone van der Waard; right: Autumn Ivy aka Wolfhead at Night; center, model and artist: Hannah Hussein and Persephone van der Waard.)

Power in Gothic: A Numinous Racket (towards unpaid labor)

Beyond castles and vampires, the above "Numinous racket" (re: Capitalist Realism furthering abjection) requires several broader steps for workers to recognize, then confront (our focus being unpaid labor [sex work] but nonetheless applying to all workers to some degree).

One, the state cryptonymically incites violence between workers using Numinous language; i.e., causing them, mid-abjection/under Capitalist Realism, to self-police/auto-flagellate using different classes of monstrous-feminine; e.g., the undead, which vampires represent (and in very "medieval" language). This being said, vampires are also sex demons—able to transform, as well as exchange unequal power and forbidden knowledge. To that, kindly reference my Undead Module to explore the poetic history and application of zombies, vampires and ghosts, and my Demon Module regarding the same for demons/stigma-animal monsters;

Capitalism achieves profit by moving money through nature; profit is built on trauma and division, wherein anything that serves profit gentrifies and decays, over and over while preying on nature. Trauma, then, cultivates strange appetites, which vary from group to group per the usual privileges and oppression as intersecting differently per case; i.e., psychosexual trauma (the regulation of state sex, terror and force) and feeding in decay 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").

i.e., "undead" and "demonic" are modular qualities that often intersect—both with each other and/or with nature: "As such, bearing pain and feeding or transformation and knowledge/power exchange is anisotropic in animalized forms of monstrous-feminine body language" (source: "Call of the Wild," 2025). Vampires, for instance, actually have undead, demonic and animalistic qualities (e.g., turning into animals but also having animalistic appetites married to churchly superstitions); i.e., that speak collectively to nature's Protestant abjection: one canonically defending the nuclear model through hypocritical means, but hyphenating this-or-that—sex and force, mouth and fang (vagina dentata). Racket aside, the state historically does so in ways they can't control; i.e., losing control when faced with the Gorgon, unleashed (e.g., the towering xenomorph [walking rape/the black knight and stowaway fears] echoing Milton's Satan, Shelley's Creature and Lovecraft's Shoggoth, etc, below): "Look on my Works, ye Mighty!"

(cited: "Giger's Xenomorph," 2025)

Two (and to compensate), the state mixes-and-matches different forms of persecution language with monster classes; e.g., blood libel, sodomy and witchcraft accusations, as well as Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) and similar bigotry modules (re: "Idle Hands Are the Devil's Workshop," 2024). Any and all canonically serve the same terrorist/counterterrorist function, one that furthers (or reverses) Capitalist Realism "on the Aegis," using Numinous language. My preference lies with Amazons and Gorgons, but these marry easily enough to castles/vampirism tied to person and place, but also sex and music (the danger disco); i.e., rebellious whores (unpaid labor) who fuck Numinously to metal to reverse abjection; re (from the Poetry Module's "In Search of the Secret Spell"):

(artist: Magion02)

Dancing feels good; so does confronting trauma during calculated risk as "cool," familiar but foreign (Castlevania's "In Search of the Secret Spell" [2006] shamelessly sneaking in a disco beat to groove among the pyramids with*). Per Matthew Lewis all the way up to me, it becomes the Gothic's usual bad, musical game of telephone, celebrating monstrous-feminine sex and force while turning Imperialism (and its semantic wreckage) into a campy joke of itself. My own quest for a Numinous Commie Mommy isn't so odd; capital makes us feel tired relative to the self-as-alien, both incumbent on the very things they rape to nurture them (re: Irigaray's creation of sexual difference). I'm hardly the first person to notice this:

[*A Gothic Orientalism, from Mary and Percy Shelley, onwards; i.e., Frankenstein but also "Ozymandias" (1818).]

As Edward Said astutely notes in Culture and Imperialism, most societies project their fears on the unknown or the exotic other. This barren land, where the viewers are kept disorientated, is threatening. It is a place between the familiar and the foreign, like part of a dream or vision that one cannot remember clearly. There is always a sense of a lurking danger from which the viewers need protection. Nikita provides that sense of protection (source: Laura Ng's "'The Most Powerful Weapon You Have': Warriors and Gender in La Femme Nikita," 2003).

I am, however, a trans woman who has gone above and beyond women like Barbara Creed, Angela Carter, Luce Irigaray and Laura Ng, etc, in my pioneering of ludo-Gothic BDSM: as a holistic, "Commy-Mommy" means of synthesizing proletarian praxis inside the operatic danger disco(-in-disguise), the "rape" castle riffing on Walpole, Lewis, Radcliffe, Konami, Nintendo, and so many others.

To it, whores embody and evoke such matters in a shared mode of expression, one whose Numinous refrain the state can't "hog" entirely for themselves and Capitalist Realism furthering abjection; re (from the Demon Module's "Of Darkness and the Forbidden," 2024):

In other words, it's the usual scapegoater summoning the Radcliffean castle during the liminal hauntology of war to enact Red Scare, except we can reclaim such devices to forge our own destinies with the self-same demonic language of the imaginary past. The state doesn't monopolize that shit, and Langella's performance (and Silvestri's sweeping score) become things to camp the ghost of "Caesar" and Marx with in equal measure: "A battle fought in the stars...now comes to Earth."

(artist: Drew Struzan)

In other words, we're talking about the Promethean Quest, which whores—vampires or otherwise, paid or not—famously belong to; i.e., while cryptomimetically channeling the Numinous with (the business of abjection); e.g., "burning Rome" vibing alongside "dumps like a truck"! Such is the Gorgon and her spectres, meaning from Shelley to us (camping Marx as we go; re: "Making Marx Gay" while "Making Demons," 2025): "Choose the form of the Destructor!" There's so many ways to break Capitalist Realism "on the Aegis"!

(artist: Alex Milne; cited: "Cornholing the Corn Lady—Ghostbusters: Afterlife and Empire," 2024)

The Numinous, then, is canonically a sham under Capitalist Realism/abjection, its evil entirely "banal" considering capital and the state (therefore revolutionary action) rely on unpaid labor to survive. "Without unpaid work, especially care work, wage work would simply be too expensive," note Patel and Moore:

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. ... Furthermore, 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. […] To ask for capitalism to pay for care is to call for an end to capitalism [emphasis, me] (source: Seven Cheap Things).

I respond, in "Raising Awareness": "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" (source: "Raising Awareness," footnotes). I add (ibid.):

The exploitation of such labor (theft is theft, rape is rape) was not restricted to the United States, but also occurred in the USSR [...] and China [...] leading to various changes in strategy [...] 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): [...] 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: [...] 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.

The Numinous racket, then, is one partly of inclusion and pay, and which asking for both happens regarding classically unpaid labor, under Capitalist and Socialist Realism; i.e., from end of capital/the state to "of the world" held Numinously hostage, onstage and off: speaking out socially regarding material harm, reversing abjection (there theft of pay and social credit) using our natural assets! Class war is ass war! Land back, labor back, sex back (reclaiming our heroes and their media/nostalgic with our bodies, while also building trust by showing who's untrustworthy mid-cryptonymy "on the Aegis"; re: "Transgressive Nudism")! Sex is a weapon, nude weaponry and armor signifying Gorgons and Amazons combating rape in concert (and which Gothic Communism pointedly transforms into social-sexual exhibits-as-praxis: labor exchanges and their art, below, functioning as "billboards" for the cause/brothel espionage taken to the streets).

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

Versus any kind of "final battle" under Capitalist Realism (e.g., the Rapture, Ragnarok, the War of the Ring, etc), these things go on—if not actually forever—then for as long as the state pimps the world, Halloween-style; i.e., between life and death, hearts and minds tied to harvest rituals since ancient times but exploited under modern ones (natural scarcity traded for manufactured scarcity). Such is the Promethean Quest, at large: a quest for the Numinous "in the flesh" that sex work specializes in (and power = public nudism in asexual*/performative ways, above and below). Sex work is work, so tip your sex workers (re: "the end of Capitalism" not just of care work getting paid, but sex work as a whole)!

*Ludo-Gothic BDSM allows for/appreciates public nudism; i.e., as "ace," illustrating mutual consent through informed labor exchanges placing "rape" in quotes. To it, many of the sex workers I work with are at least partly ace/victims of trauma; e.g., Cuwu but also Blxxd Bunny. Either likes being used like a doll, with dolls "magically" able to play with trauma through play; i.e., play = control during calculated risk, mutual consent unfolding in ways that place a buffer between the trauma and the sex (re: "The Finale" and "Back to Jadis' Dollhouse," 2023 and 2024). In turn, the thrill of exposing something forbidden under capital becomes Numinous, speaking to/with genocidal trauma tied to forbidden workers; i.e., in ways that work past runaway vaso vagal, a given return to trauma (often a house) embracing "trauma" in quotes (to heal from rape with "rape"). For a deeper focus on the explicitly non-sexual elements of this struggle, refer to "Crash Course: An Introduction to Asexuality and Demisexuality" (written 2022, published 2025).

Power in Gothic: the Promethean Quest and Cartesian Thought

So far, we've examined nature as something to pimp by capital/the state; re: through vampires and castles having animal, chattelized qualities, under Capitalist Realism; now we'll examine the Promethean Quest as central to Cartesian aims, and some of the ways said Quest plays out per Cartesian thought (as something to contest; e.g., Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus, below). Let's deconstruct that!

First, you can't scapegoat capital—the Gorgon just a whore to pimp, and one whose planetary chickens come home to roost; re: a return to trauma in deeply nostaglic, fatal and fortified, siege-like forms of power-in-decay (e.g., the Countess both fascist and Commie, mocking the heroic death-before-dishonor approach of the player[s]: by inviting them in like vampires). Any way you slice it, then, canon doesn't create and cherish life, through science; it preserves the Protestant ethic under Cartesian thought—mad science glorifying slavery and rape; i.e., by cutting nature into ribbons, then stitching its dead matter hideously into unloved composites under false benevolence: the de facto owners of the Earth, operating under various technologies (and dogmas) of conquest.

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

As such, there's a pimp/whore quality to Cartesian thought, ergo the Numinous being chased, in canonical Gothic—always for exploitation, but given quaintly arbitrary names: "heaven in a wildflower," "darkness visible," or hell, Josey and the Pussycats! All represent "nature" as something to invade and control; i.e., per an ancient pact, one whose covenant ties to the Protestant ethic owning the planet as monstrous-feminine under capital (and its rackets): "Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. The fear and dread of you will fall on every living creature on the earth, every bird of the air, every creature that crawls on the ground, and all the fish of the sea. They are delivered into your hand. Everything that lives and moves will be food for you; just as I gave you the green plants, I now give you all things" (source: Genesis 9). God was a pimp, any Numinous evocation of God (specifically His wrath) serving profit, under capital; i.e., by turning nature into a product: a floor model of the dutiful servant, the virgin/whore monstrous-feminine something to possess in people and place, alike! "Her ass is the Earth, a cake to cut up and sell, piece-by-piece like Frankenstein's Monster!"

(artist: SGT Madness; cited: re: "So Many Monsters, So Little Time")

To this, the Promethean Quest critiques the Cartesian (mis)treatment of nature—indeed, the entire globe—as "already dead," owned and used by the elite; i.e., like clay to aggrandize the current ordering of things come home to roost. As such, its reckoning effectively concerns the canonical theft of power from the imaginary past, therefore Gorgon as trapped in Cartesian duality (and male versions of the whore; e.g., Skeletor and his own traveling vampire castle, several images back); i.e., to further profit mid-abjection/during different social syndromes, their reversals burning the militarily optimistic for said theft; re: the whore's revenge breaking Capitalist Realism per monstrous-feminine refrain, be that Josie and Pussycats or Nya Blue (above and below). Such things historically "map out" on the body as castle-like, but also the territories routinely invaded (to move money through nature as monstrous-feminine/a "sassy peach" to endlessly carve up; re: "Nature Is Food"). It's a runway and holiday—one to time the usual grim harvests with, and where we reclaim such things "on the Aegis"; re (from Volume One's "Challenging the State's Manufactured Consent and Stupidity (with Vampires; feat. Cuwu)," 2024):

(exhibit 11b1b: Artist, left: Nya Blu. We all have skulls inside us. According to the Gothic tradition inside the Imperial Core, inheritance anxiety historically-materially communicates internalized trauma as suggested within workers but expressed according to their surface-level appearance in the material world; i.e., who, regardless of their origins, will be judged and consumed based how they appear relative to a cultural understanding of the imaginary past as something to constantly look at, vis-à-vis Segewick's "Imagery of the Surface" [1980]. Nya, for example, is covered in tattoos that speak to Cartesian trauma and the Gothic as something to wear on her skin, reassembled there after having been created many times before. She's a walking fortress, utterly stacked but rife with surface tension. She performs the paradox that Charlotte Brontë's Anne Causeway could not, the latter woman entirely doomed inside the attic for no one to see [except in dream-like reveries]. The paradox is a doubled form of emancipation that occurs through confrontation; i.e., a savvy and brave wielding of the very things used to coop her up in the white man's home, but also his colonizer's heart and mind and those of an imperial readership then and now seeing her "of nature" and nature as psychosexual food [something to remember during the roadmap, part three, which examines Cartesian fetishization of nature-as-food and how to subvert it with our bodies during ludo-Gothic BDSM].)

I've previously considered this idea, per abjection/the Promethean Quest, many times; re: through ludo-Gothic BDSM and the palliative Numinous; i.e., concerning "capital in small," specifically Metroidvania's

• cartographic refrains (the high-fantasy treasure map and retro-future site for urban warfare, below—2023)
• military optimism (the desire to destroy state victims by abjecting them in Promethean ways, 2021)
• and canonical essentialism (the destiny of moral geographies per cartographic refrain, 2024);

My doing so is holistic, combining these concepts to combat Capitalist Realism; re (from Volume Zero's "Scouting the Field"):

(exhibit 1a1a1h2a1: "When Alexander saw the breadth of his domain, he wept for there were no more worlds to conquer." Videogames are war simulators; in them, maps are built not merely to be charted and explored, but conquered through war simulations. The land is an endless site of conquest, war, rape and profit carefully dressed up as "treasure," "liberation" and "adventure," but in truth, brutalizing nature during endless wars of extermination borrowed from the historical and imaginary past as presently intertwined:

• • top-left: Tolkien's refrain, "Thror's Map" from The Hobbit, 1937

—source: Weta Workshop

• • top-right: Thomas Happ's map of Sudra from Axiom Verge, 2015

—source: magicofgames

• • bottom-left: Team Cherry's map of Hallownest, from Hollow Knight 2017

—source: tuppkam1

• • bottom-right: Bungie's map of the West from Myth: the Fallen Lords, 1997

—source: Ben's Nerdery

Though certainly not unique to Tolkien, and popularized in the shooter genre vis-à-vis Cameron, Tolkien near-single-handedly popularized the idea of "world-building" in fantasy by making a mappable world full of languages he invented, but which he tied to the larger process of world war that has been replicated countless times since; i.e., the idea of the map as a space for conquest that paralleled the elite raping Earth repeatedly as translated to the videogame format; e.g., Myth, Axiom Verge, Hollow Knight, above [our focus, in the next subchapter, will be on Metroidvania, not the RTS].

Under Capitalist Realism, Hell is a place that always appears on Earth [or an Earth-like double]—a black fortress threatening state hegemony during the inevitable decay of a colonial body. Its widening state of exception must then be entered by the hero during the liminal hauntology of war as a repeatable, monomythic excursion—a franchise to subdue during military optimism sold as a childhood exercise towards "playing war" in fantastical forms; e.g., Castlevania or Metroid. Conjure a Radcliffean menace inside the Imperial Core, then meet it with American force. / Threatened, the state always responds with violence before anything else. Male or female, then, the hero becomes the elite's exterminator, destroyer and retrieval expert, infiltrating a territory of crisis to retrieve the state's property [weapons, princesses, monarchic symbols of power, etc] while simultaneously chattelizing nature in reliably medieval ways: alienating and fetishizing its "wild" variants, crushing them like vermin to maintain Cartesian supremacy and heteronormative familial structures [...]

[artist: Persephone van der Waard]

However tremendously mysterious these abstractions feel, they denote equally planetary degrees of material force under Cartesian thought; i.e., specifically tokenized launderings of the Promethean Quest "pimping the Gorgon"; re (from the Undead Module):

the dialectic of shelter and the alien enacted canonically through people (men of reason) and places (castles, including Metroidvania) to punch Medusa [...] That's what the Promethean Quest effectively encapsulates and discourages, Medusa fucking back to reverse the flow of power and information the monomyth normally supplies in outright parental language, but also monomythic media exposed to middle-class children at a young age (source: "'She Fucks Back'; or, Revisiting The Modern Prometheus through Astronoetics," 2024).

Sex = home, one the former relegates to under universally harmful models (re: Foucault—again, what Patel and Moore call "a 16th century ecology" or "Great Domestication"); i.e., that workers can camp, but not automatically (and always while viewed as "brainless" whores incapable of instruction; e.g., Cuwu and I pimped by our audience, the world, as whorephobic in all the usual [settler-colonial, Cartesian, heteronormative] ways): Butler's infamous gender trouble (1990) and subsequent parody occupying the same zones that force and sex do (and ones with a strong GNC vibe, be it from drag queens, catboys—or in my and Cuwu's case—trans folk). Gothic hyphenates sex and home, but also war and death, food and sickness, vibes and atmosphere, ecstasy and madness, to speak in naked code; e.g., "wasted" sperm (re: Cuwu and I, below, putting it to extramarital/revolutionary use); i.e., in neo-medieval forms, their playful usage passing "data" cryptonymically along ("Gothic" previously meaning "medieval" of a more literal sort—meaning before Walpole popularized hauntological spaces of "rape" to play with, and which ludo-Gothic BDSM learned from[6]).

(artists: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard)

Not all regressions are bad. However, per Francis Bacon's rapaciously Cartesian desires, we see a larger trend looping in and out of fiction:

Descartes had not stumbled upon his revolutionary philosophy all on his own. The second law of capitalist ecology, domination over nature, owed much to Francis Bacon (1561–1626), a philosopher widely credited as the father of modern science. (That gendered language will make sense in a moment.) Bacon was also a prominent member of England's political establishment, at different times a member of Parliament and the attorney general of England and Wales. He argued that "science should as it were torture nature’s secrets out of her." Further, the "empire of man" should penetrate and dominate the "womb of nature." Science must "hound nature in her wanderings, and you will be able, when you like, to lead and drive her afterwards to the same place again… Neither ought a man to make scruple of entering and penetrating into these holes and corners, when the inquisition of truth is his whole object." Bacon was a major political figure at a time when the lives of European women were being threatened, surveilled, and dominated in new—and thoroughly modern—ways (source: Seven Cheap Things).

To said trend, the Gorgon's role becomes two-fold—something to chase and steal power from in paradoxically anti-predatory ways, by us; i.e., by campy actors in and out of Metroidvania's predatory language, said language lifting directly from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein 

Cartesian thought is dogmatic, and dogma is criminogenic, Frankenstein argues. Conducive to the very conquests that Metroidvania map out, the latter only wait to reenact through the discovery of old worlds like Shelley's palimpsest: new sites of plunder and death, ergo colonization per the usual cartographic architecture (thus refrains); i.e., "a technology of conquest," Patel and Moore rightly posit, "[one where m]edieval multiple vantage points in art and literature were displaced by a single, disembodied, omniscient and panoptic eye."

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! Whether from workers or the state—either chasing the Gorgon (and her screaming shadow, below), at cross purposes—the fuel is pain, hatred, and death (the Numinous in Metroidvania echoing Sontag's "Fascinating Fascism," 1974). However extinct Medusa may seem, no monopolies on any of those things presently exist:

(source: "Silksong Symposium").

and for sources of stolen power (unpaid workers housing the fire of the gods, above) to defend themselves with; i.e., while taking it back from Cartesian robbers, "fire with fire":

Asymmetrical warfare classically relies on terror weapons to alter the colonial mindset to destroy itself; i.e., Ozymandian syndrome: "Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!" Hollow power, hollow knight—invaded by hysteria, the Archaic Mother's Wandering Womb (or bicycle face); i.e., sacking Troy's rebuilders by making them Athena's Trojan Horse, reversed by the vengeful Gorgon: "When Perseus slew the Medusa he did not – as commonly thought – put an end to her reign or destroy her terrifying powers" (source: The Monstrous-Feminine). Chief among them is simply telling the state: "remember that you, too, must die" (the memento mori a bit smug in its reminders). Medusa is a Leveler—one whose petrifying vision spells doom, as does viewing whatever she has to show conveying Numinous qualities (above and below); i.e., the cryptonymy is the map, but also the bones hidden inside: the state having eaten itself alive (the ignominious death)! / By comparison, canon is patriarchal, thus mortal and begot from primordial female/monstrous-feminine origins. [...] To summarize, capital's worst nightmare is basically a facet of nature that can think for itself, suggesting planetary rebellion through singular instances thereof it will try to tokenize (ibid.).

To conclude our Promethean survey (and, indeed, the entire section), Medusa is a whore and whores fuck to metal; i.e., as something to learn from that reverses abjection, vampires-and-castles, nature-and-Numinous. Bakhtin, for example, argues how castles remain central, in Gothic, to narrative (the chronotope, or time-space):

Toward the end of the seventeenth century in England, a new territory for novelistic events is constituted and reinforced in the so-called "Gothic" or "black" novel—the castle (first used in this meaning by Horace Walpole in The Castle of Otranto, and later in Radcliffe, Monk Lewis and others). The castle is saturated through and through with a time that is historical in the narrow sense of the word, that is, the time of the historical past [...] the traces of centuries and generations are arranged in it in visible form as various parts of its architecture [...] and in particular human relationships involving dynastic primacy and the transfer of hereditary rights. [...] legends and traditions animate every corner of the castle and its environs through their constant reminders of past events. It is this quality that gives rise to the specific kind of narrative inherent in castles and that is then worked out in Gothic novels (source: The Dialogic Imagination, 1981).

As I argue, it's the "perfect domme" (re: "Interrogating Power through Your Own Camp")—with "castle" and "domme" being two sides of the same coin, one to "spend" in shared theatrical spaces; i.e., the arcade or circus of a Gothic, "traveling castle" sort that vampires "dig*." Like abjection at large, such spaces remain wholly dualistic: for state defenders to justify genocide with, pointedly moving money through nature (and whose vampirism Cartesian models call "progress"), and for defenders of nature (meaning those classified "of nature" by state power) to vampirically reclaim, per Promethean Quest: a thing to dualistically seek, occupy and embody "in small," mise-en-abyme. Either way (and regardless of the poetic focus), Medusa is something to habitually chase and learn from; i.e., using the language of stolen power and death, ergo "conquering" and "rape" that BDSM (and Gothic) exemplify, "on the Aegis"; re: during ludo-Gothic BDSM and any variant of the "perfect domme" (my focus being Gorgons, Amazons and Metroidvania, but vampires working just as well, below). Seeing how exploitation and liberation occupy the same place, "power" remains something to forever interrogate (through canon or camp): by going where it is and playing with it, mid-abjection (therefore calculated risk). Numinous isn't strictly under state thrall, but a lesson for future iconoclasm to occur while learning from the rock 'n roll "past." "The power of the babe!" She sucks, too!

(artist: Eves-eme; cited: "The World Is a Vampire")

*The Gothic loves puns, but also oxymorons; e.g., live burial paradoxically evoking salvation and damnation, curses and divine retribution, life after death, feast and famine, appetite and addict, reaping and ritual, Catholic miracles, etc, as poetically erotic; i.e., "little death," graveyard sex and ghouls/cannibalism, which vampires and Gothic castles exemplify to varying degrees (sex and death going paradoxically together like peanut butter and chocolate, Meatloaf and murder).

Nonetheless, such things remain linguistically imperfect per the abjection process; i.e., as we've played with, here, and for whom a paradoxically medical utility lurks among the barbers. Now that we've played with abjection a fair bit, let's get back on track!

The Linguistic Imperfection of Abjection; re: Concerning Medicine (reprise/coda)

No matter how precise we make it, "on paper," language "at play" is always a little "fuzzy"; Gothic language is fuzzy in ways both "medical" and "mad," but also policed, mid-abjection, by state forces pimping such "miracles" (the Gorgon's Numinous resurrection predating Christ's own, below). So we've shown. 

(artist: Jeremy Anninos)

However, consider how monopolies of anything are a myth, including abjection as far as medicine goes (so-called "Wandering Womb" millennia old, but not one the state exclusively can abuse). Fetishes—contrary to popular belief, then—exist among the medicalized to reclaim their agency as stolen from them; i.e., by the state and/or by various medical conditions the Gothic touches poetically on. Likewise, medieval poetics confront death and medical abuse by merging life with death (and food with sickness, war with sex, weakness with strength, poverty with plenty, and so on); i.e., so-called "hysteria" applying not just to people who give birth (uterus-havers), but anyone treated as monstrous-feminine to Numinous extremes: the way out is "on the Aegis," the Gorgon not exclusively female (despite humans all starting as female, but I digress).

And provided that usage is understood and doesn't eclipse or otherwise overlook the medical reality of people with actual medical disorders (diseases and syndromes), then no harm, no foul! It also bears repeating Nancy Drew Syndrome isn't a real medical disease, nor is it strictly being treated like one by me (any more than "zombie" is, for example). Ultimately, to be medically accurate, we wouldn't say "syndrome" but bias, or "having a problem"; i.e., to indicate we're not discussing a real disease (in the medical sense) but nonetheless a situation or social condition (and subsequent comorbidities/criminogenic factors) where something is wrong: in ways not immediately dissimilar to a disease; re: fascism being a death cult where its practitioners were both socially unwell and medically "in shape" (not insane), yet clearly in a state of crisis/decay to be described as categorically "sick." To fuss about "fascism" or "disease" versus "bigoted" is—to some extent, then—to mince words. 

Such things don't always roll off the tongue, of course—nor is there any silver-tongued phrase that satisfies the medical and social at once (though Foucault's "bio-power" tries to, aka "insect politics," above). In other words, language is "fuzzy" to allow some degree of choice to happen: when passing our offspring along (a metaphor for eating capital alive; re: "The Caterpillar and the Wasp," also above—2024). To that, and regardless of whom, language users historically refer to/rely on intuition as taught; i.e., what I refer to as emotional and Gothic intelligence: how language utilizes over time, cultivated preferentially through good praxis (re: "The Basics of Oppositional Synthesis," 2024). I call this larger idea the Wisdom of the Ancients, or cultural understanding of the imaginary past (re: "On Giving Birth," 2023)—one whose poetic network of social-sexual habits curates our aforementioned intelligence and awareness: leading towards a better understanding of the human condition when permanently transforming capital, generally by gestating inside a living host (re: the wasp larva, above)! Call it "xenomorph," if you will; or "vampire" or "zombie," provided you reverse abjection by avoiding the slur function.

(exhibit 41j [from "The World Is a Vampire"]: Model and artist, middle-to-right: Blxxd Bunny and Persephone van der Waard...)

In short, we're not seeking the perfect word, "on paper," but a more skillful utilization of language, mid-abjection; i.e., as alive in "undead" ways (or demonic/animalistically stigmatic per various strange appetites that capital historically affords, but I digress). This means not dissecting language "to death," but accounting for those (un)living "imperfections"; i.e., that overly clinical language tends to outright destroy/discredit. Language is a tool to accomplish our aims, referring to its living usage while keeping various practical realities also in mind. To it, I'm not diagnosing Watson as mentally ill when using the word "syndrome," nor am I downplaying actual mental illnesses when playing among the tombstones as "mad" (re: "Showing Off during Playtime"). Instead, it's a metaphor—one that describes a larger situation at play by poetic means/Gothic shorthand (and something borrowed from men like Marx, Matthew Lewis, and Walpole, and women like Shelley and Radcliffe; e.g., Marx' vampire analogy when describing capital's predatory qualities; see: "Limits of the Working-Day" 1867).

I realize this metaphorical approach's "slipperiness" might bother some. So might "witch," "zombie," "demon," "vampire" or "werewolf," etc, when describing symptoms of capital through a panoply of caricatures; i.e., in ways that—when holistically* revisited by me—hopefully dodge the original historical bias (and medical abuse) such labels canonically impart; re: by reversing abjection "on the Aegis" like whores classically do, and taken to nerdy extremes† by educated whores. Before we can "nerd out," though (more than we already have, that is), we must understand abjection as a basic process (on to use on Watson, versus merely playing with dolls)!

*I.e., as Gothic Communism does, and by extension, all workers when reversing abjection, mid-cryptonym (through things that seem "corrupt," "opaque" or absurd, but in truth are the data; e.g., Milton's "darkness visible," Shelley's "fire of the gods" or Key and Peele's "pussy on the chainwax"): "Returning and reflecting upon old points after assembling them is a powerful way to understand larger structures and patterns (especially if they're designed to conceal themselves through subterfuge, valor and force). It's what holistic study (the foundation of this book) is all about" (source: "Shining a Light on Things," 2023).

(artist: Geminisoku)

†E.g., Mary Shelley being a classic "homewrecker" and giant nerd, one whose affair with Percy Shelley ultimately saw her beau's first wife committing suicide (re: "Making Demons" 2025). Revolution's a messy business, especially for women—with Mary in particular having sired (and lost) multiple children out of wedlock to her future husband before she was twenty(!). Indeed, her magnus opus (on mad science, childbirth and bad parentage, mid-abjection) wasn't a human child; it was actually her first novel, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818)—with Shelley's crowning achievement "birthing" the modern sci-fi genre (and its Marxist roots) also before she was twenty: she wrote much of the novel when she was eighteen, the story releasing the year Marx was born! His "spectre haunting Europe" borrowed liberally from Shelley's "demon," the latter stalking Victor (to reverse abjection) years in advance!

Abjection Primer: the Basic Process (reprise)

As stated—and will be stated again, here and deeper in—Rebecca Watson has Nancy Drew Syndrome and Nancy Drew's a cop/TERF; i.e., a form of class betrayal, mid-abjection. So are all Gothic heroines—meaning from classic literature into modern adaptations in and out of fiction (re: "Radcliffe's Refrain"); i.e., they further abjection* by treating different out-groups as monstrous-feminine* "on the Aegis": TERF-style pimps rejecting the "irrational" or unheimlich in favor of an "orderly" existence cleaning house—one whose Cartesian outlook/dubiously "scientific" rationale punches down, out from the Enlightenment (and its love for the bigoted past, below) and into Pax Americana. It's all part of the same basic, us-versus-them process: pimping nature (often through token means imitating the same statuesque refrain, also below).

(artist: Martian Zombie)

*Re: Per 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).

Violence, terror and monsters—all occupy the same Aegis, or stage-like mirror shield poetically described by Barbara Creed; i.e., one that, in truth, highlights a broadly dualistic polity whose disparate poetic voices (and interwoven socio-material factors) encompass basic abjection: things treated as monstrous-feminine under Cartesian thought, ergo in violent, terrifying ways the state tries to monopolize, on the Aegis (through heroic sex and force; re: pimping nature as whore-like/feeding on things "of nature" in abjectly harmful ways, female or not; see: "Nature Is Food"):

(artist: Doc Zenith)

To that, "peace" is a white man's word, and the classic keepers of peace in Gothic stories (read: material disputes) were white straight (or at least cis) women—their classic foils not just evil Italian counts, but so-called "vampires" and Medusa, too: witches and goblins (the classic abductors and eaters of children) but also "sodomites" that fall into the same zone of abjection; e.g., the bored, spoiled (and predominantly white) housewives from Eartha Kitt's "I Don't Care" (1984), policing the "Gorgon-in-small" for having the whore's revenge* under state (thus Cartesian, settler-colonial and heteronormative) models; i.e., suffering from virgin/whore (therefore Nancy Drew) syndrome, as much as the gun-toting boys do:

*Re: the whore's revenge against profit as the pimp's revenge, mid-abjection: the oldest profession therefore struggle under state models (and contradictions) arbitrarily designating rape-as-status, cop/victim and virgin/whore to police care work (especially sex work; re: "Rape Reprise").

Token or not, these witch hunters defend the same nuclear model since Ancient Athens (and its own tokenization of women versus "Amazonian" homewreckers): from the Gorgon as status; i.e., under a patriarchal status quo whose qualities under capital would only expand (to better move money through nature—as Patel and Moore phrase it—by cheapening nature as a process of exploitation, which abjection is). Power—as something to control, mid-abjection—is always dark and evil, virgin/whore. In turn, everyone loves the whore because she's silly and badass, serious and fun; the state, through Nancy Drew Syndrome, loves to pimp the whore out of mean-spirited revenge: for daring to petrify profit, thus turn her rapist* to stone (re: "Rape Reprise")! So while reversing abjection might seem to "bring disaster" down on our heads, segregation is no defense; re: the state rapes by design. Better, then, to embody what our enemies fear, meaning in ways we control the outcome with!

*Classically by the god Neptune[3] but really any form of patriarchal power "aping Pygmalion" (rubbing one out on Galatea's stony surface).

Abjection Primer: Reversing Abjection and Cryptonymy

As something to further (and to reiterate), Kristeva's abjection process boils down to us-versus-them. By comparison, reversing abjection reclaims the language of abjection to humanize the alien; i.e., "on the Aegis" as corporal, but also extreme; re: with me taking Barbara Creed's monstrous-feminine to intersectional (and multimedia) extremes:

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

To it, nudity (and nude "violence," if only from the pimp) equals a terror weapon* with no singular use; e.g., Harmony's aforementioned backside (above and below) functioning like the Gorgon's magnetic lure: to cryptonymically† freeze our enemies in place (for fearing the whore-like body out in the open), but also empower ourselves through paradoxical exposure educating workers; i.e., to see what they might normally abject like a severed head ("blaming the whore," as it were, a "homewrecker" scapegoat to preserve nuclear models)! It's the apple to consume while centering the conversation around us, meaning in ways we control; i.e., despite state claims of sovereignty. Per Medusa and the abjection process, the "Numinous" becomes a double-edged sword—a deadly game of "dress up" workers have to play. Might as well "stack" the deck in our favor (re: the whore's revenge when calculating risk, reducing it through anti-predation schemes with fetishized alien flavors)!

*From Robert Asprey's War in the Shadows (1975): "terror is the kissing cousin of force" (source). "Class war is ass war," I argue—Medusa the ultimate guerilla, waging as(s)ymetrical warfare between workers channeling Medusa-esque "vibes": "So when the Man comes around, show him your Aegis! Chase the Numinous and use the Medusa's hellish power—your hellish power—to humanize the harvest! Anisotropically expose the state as inhumane! Reverse terrorist and counterterrorist during class war as guerrilla war!" (source: "Kicks After Six: Always Another Castle," 2025).

†Re: To show and hide at the same time. 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" (2024) and "The World Is a Vampire" to see these ideas explored by me through Marx' ideas; 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"). 

(artist: Harmony Corrupted; cited: "In Measured Praise of the Great Enchantress," 2025)

And while we'll unpack abjection (and the monstrous-feminine) more during the symposium, here we shall simply highlight its apotropaic (warding off of evil to prevent harm*) and anisotropic character (determined by the direction power flows); i.e., when Her Majesty (and her majestic dumper) "clap back" in various ways (e.g., Metroidvania and the Promethean Quest; re: "'She Fucks Back"). Such ideas are merely a "taste," one belonging to a larger dialectical-material process; i.e., one "burning Rome" over time, the proverbial orchard punching up. Its changing through decay only leads towards a wholly liberatory direction by paradoxically "hugging the alien," thus bridging the gap that capital (and Cartesian thought) historically-materially generate: understanding power as alien in ways that humanize state victims, meaning those "demons" dehumanized differently while reaching towards a shared goal during ludo-Gothic BDSM camping the canon† (aka rape play and all the phobias tied to that, medical or otherwise; re: "Healing from Rape" and "I'll See You In Hell").

*Often with symbols of evil like Medusa's head; i.e., a relegation/partitioning of abuse and call to violence, hers specifically a sexualized fetish abused by patriarchal men/reclaimed by victims of said men (re: "Always a Victim," 2025)

†Re: "Camping the Canon," from Colin Broadmoor to me, 2021 and 2023.

(artist: Soli; cited: "Our Sweet Revenge")

Reversing abjection, like Plato's cave, is deeply intense because it challenges beliefs baked into us, early in our lives; i.e., Quixotically challenging popular notions of forbidden love to reverse abjection with (e.g., the lady and the tramp, but also the pauper and the prince, above). However linguistically imperfect my usage of "syndrome" is, then, know it's done in good faith; re: avoiding a slur-like usage while simultaneously heeding medicalized feedback when reversing abjection—not to simply hug the alien but heed them and whatever alienation they know through lived experience: shared with others not as complete strangers, but allies to potentially relate to by reversing abjection in a variety of social-sexual ways (with me having dated or otherwise befriended/played with other workers bearing different personality disorders and physical disabilities/divergencies I, myself, lack; re: Bay being physically disabled from chronic fatigue syndrome, Cuwu having borderline personality disorder, Victoria being intersex/suffering from surgical traumas targeting intersex people, Cryptic Cripple being a disabled parent who fetishizes they and their caregiver's relationship, Crow being body-positive in ways that push towards fat liberation, and another [unshown] partner having endometriosis and narcissistic personality disorder, two images down).

(exhibit 3: Artist, bottom-left: J. Scott Campbell; bottom-right, from Brooklyn Museum [originally 1987]: Avram Finkelstein, Brian Howard, Oliver Johnston, Charles Kreloff, Chris Lione, and Jorge Socarrás. The state will always punch down at whores, policing them through manufactured crisis [therefore abjection] baked into capital: blaming the victim not just as "whore" but "witch" [and similar poetries of abjection the state tries to monopolize; e.g., the Nazis [top] shuttering the Weimar brothels to further abjection [re: "Joy Under Fascism"].)

In other words (and in keeping with Gothic), forbidden love is generally framed as "criminal" by those furthering abjection, which we reverse while living our lives in poetically political ways: through anti-vaudeville, exploitation and liberation sharing the same liminal spaces of play. The potential for toxicity is always there, but liberation is never strictly "impossible." To that, fortune favors the bold, and silence is genocide to speak cryptonymically out, concerning. This includes death (e.g., Finkelstein et al, above), whose part of the abjection process (medical or not) we challenge by speaking out; i.e., there's no monopolies on whores/the monstrous-feminine, anymore than green skin, fetish gear and pink triangles are during a perennial witch hunt (above): Asprey's terror being the "kissing cousin of force" the state will call violence because it requires pimp-like violence (against nature/sex work) to survive. Yet

(artist: Mercedes the Muse)

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 [our enemies] 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) [source: "Raising Awareness"].

*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":

†Re: See all these concepts outlined in "The State: Its Key Tools."

Ego, we workers treated like whores can camp such things, ourselves; i.e., time a circular reality under state deceptions, the generational problems thereof needing intersectional solutions to reverse abjection by fighting "fire" with proverbial "fire"; e.g., as my friends and I have done, our own revolutionary cryptonymy (re: "Transgressive Nudism") working much how Medusa (and non-tokenized Amazons) did, do, will do again:

(exhibit 4: Artist, top-left: Bay; top-middle: Cryptic Cripple; top-right: Victoria Saix; bottom-left: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard; bottom-right: Crow. Apart from being neurodivergent/mentally ill, all of us are marginalized in different congenital-to-comorbid ways: many of us are victims of different abuse, including sexual abuse, emotional harm and various bigotries; i.e., in ways we unify together to speak collectively out regarding harm as something to prevent; e.g., the above examples taken from a shared exhibit, "Abashed the Devil Stood" speaking out against fatphobia, transphobia, and genocide through the medical industry to liberate ourselves from while inside; re [from "White Moderates Don't Challenge Fascism"]:

(artist, left: Solomon Nelson; right: Persephone van der Waard)

[...] Solomon says "ob*se" isn't a slur because of where he uses it. Except a slur is a slur by virtue of its usage, thus function; e.g., my straight sibling saying "faggot" in his car but telling me about it, versus Solomon saying "ob*se" to his friends, which I catch wind of and respond to as victims of the medical industry.

To it, we sluts celebrate ourselves versus people like you snobbily treating us like "disease" (the pimp's refrain); i.e., as you celebrate the very world order brutalizing workers through eating disorders, body dysmorphia (called muscle dysmorphia, with body builders), and gender dysphoria made congenital; re: we're products of our environment fed to us, which we must challenge through what the state (and doctors), control, vis-à-vis socio-material conditions; e.g., women's bodies, non-white bodies, gay bodies, and bodies doing sex work as paid/unpaid. "Who's the savage? Modern man!" (Judas Priest's "Savage," 1978).

This isn't my opinion, alone, but my friends' opinions, too; i.e., through their bodies, but also their words associated with said bodies reclaiming the Base and recultivating the Superstructure; e.g., my partner Rob, who read this essay only to give feedback, afterwards:

Here's a really good article on weight and then on top of that people on antidepressants/antipsychotics/birth control/any number of meds are screwed + the corruption of the sugar industry in the US + inaccessibility of nutritional education and healthcare + popularity of crash diets and dangerous surgeries + genetics all contribute to obesity. Being fat isn’t a moral failing it's a consequence of human diversity, epigenetic factors and a sociological environment. But yeah being fat puts you at risk of certain things, certain things also put you at risk of being fat. It's something to be aware of but is morally neutral and is basically as morally significant as living in certain zip codes which can also impact length of life. All those things are sociological and not really individual beyond the health consequences that individual people experience. And even then it ultimately comes down to a lack of understanding, lack of certain resources in spite of abundance of others, and just sheer luck and sure maybe a few personal factors but that's in the minority.

Keeping that in mind, the medical industry and its tentacles are things to protect against, which extends to different vulnerable groups targeted by medical interference and obstruction...

Such dialogs intersect, allowing someone like like Bay or Cuwu—the former who is Indigenous and a therian on top of their physical disabilities, the latter who is—to communicate with me; i.e., through a shared, imperfect [unidentical] experience of alienation, therefore oppression: to reclaim what makes us alien in normal society that we might cure the disease, reversing abjection in ways tied to older cultures; e.g., in Maori culture, where 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.

Apart from outright diseases and their poetics, then, I also love to research Amazons/Gorgons [Creed's the monstrous-feminine] per a cop/criminal status; re: abjection. Unlike the defensive armor of Amazons, the "Gorgon" and her nudity are often weapons to attack for anti-predation means; i.e., while reversing abjection through "paradoxical exposure," speaking out concerning rape by using our bodies tied to labor, the land, and sex [as things to reclaim; re: "Our Sweet Revenge"]. Here, I've merely given some literally "naked" examples we won't see, deeper in: those "terrifying" things to take back and humanize ourselves/speak out using in highly poetic ways, shocking the system to alter it over time; i.e., dressed up as "mere play" [re: Gloggins]. Teaching requires repetition, monsters or not [so does sex, but I digress].)

On Glasses, Nerds and Bein' Mean

All this being said, I'm good-faith but good-faith doesn't mean "be nice." Yes, I respect the work Watson does, meaning enough to suitably criticize her in good faith; i.e., as I—a trans sex worker academic—would needle any other public thinker, activist and/or academic for/with (sex is a weapon, but also dialogs about/with sex as weapon-like). I say this while, again, being an activist, academic and PhD/multi-book author but also rape survivor (re: "I'm a Rape Survivor"). Furthermore, if Watson's actually as "rational" as she claims to be, she—a cis STEM nerd versus a trans sex worker and Gothicist like me (who hates math)—should be able to handle whatever I dish out and learn something in the bargain!

(source)

I also make fun of Watson's perpetually nerdy appearance (e.g., from 2011, above), but do so as a fellow weird nerd having worn glasses myself in the past; i.e., me, punching up at someone who apparently wears the damn things like armor from criticism: "You wouldn't hit a girl, would you? Especially a girl wearing glasses?" My point in targeting Watson's aesthetic is that plenty of other nerds—often white straight male nerds under fascist orders—use it to self-validate, a priori; i.e., enjoying a fair amount of protection, since the Enlightenment; e.g., Victor Frankenstein, Roger Ebert, Bill Gates, Heinrich Himmler, Ian Kochinski, the rapey "heroes" from Revenge of the Nerds (1984), Mandark from Dexter's Laboratory (1995), that annoying guy from Shaun of the Dead (2006), etc: real jerks monopolizing nerd culture, and  for whom seemingly crude, brute-force phrases like "Get fucked, four-eyes!" leap to mind. Yet, ad hominems are a kind of fallacy that means "attack the man," not the argument; "four-eyes," as I use it, speaks to hypocrisy and appearance, arm-in-arm. I'm also an iconoclast, which means no double standards, no prisoners! Nerds (male or not) can absolutely be wrong (and if you don't believe me, go read Frankenstein; re: "Making Demons")! In stating this, I'm merely pointing out nerd hypocrisy through nerd aesthetic—one Watson clearly wears on her sleeve: a brand, which I can critique. Given I'm also a woman/anti-fascist nerd, I feel that's only fair!

In other words, glasses are cool (and hot, below); the "baddies" wearing them can be cool, but never enough to be wholly above reproach (context matters):

(exhibit 2: Left [citing exhibit 6b2a1, from "Two Years Later (give or take) after Five Books," 2025]: "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!"; bottom-right: ibid., Cuwu being a ML who shaped my thought process [and lent me Patel and Moore's Seven Cheap Things]; top-right-middle: Delilah Gallo, a sex educator, worker and activist; top-far-right: Harmony Corrupted, a metalhead sex worker who appears in my book series many times. I've interviewed both Harmony and Delilah in my "Hailing Hellions" [2025] Q&A series.)

To summarize (and conclude) this particular point, the recipient of my critique is a self-titled "progressive" and nerd (or geek—same difference); i.e., less low-hanging fruit than some of the people I look into (re: open fascists). However, Watson merits criticism all the same (e.g., saying "we chose fascism in 2024" being a statement I—a historian and queer sex-worker academic/activist—take umbrage with). Some of this involves a nerd aesthetic; re: I'm a nerd and critique her hypocrisy through her aesthetic (therefore argument): from one nerd to another (with me, a Gothic nerd, relying on older female, "Radcliffean" nerds from Neo-Gothic media to make my point; i.e., often detectives solving "mysteries" haunted by rape, their virginal modesty threatened as much by sodomy-coded witches, vampires and whores* [or pirates, in Radcliffe's case] as by any non-girl property† dispute; e.g., the Nancy Drew paperbacks, but also Hanna-Barbera's Velma Dinkley [1969] and "Nancy" from Wes Craven's A Nightmare on Elm Street [1984], below). Still, no offense meant to other nerds out there. Like witches or wizards, nerds can be good or bad to varying degrees!

*What Cynthia Wolff calls "demon lovers" in "The Radcliffean Gothic Model," said model generally acted out through so-called "closed space" (the haunted house, Gothic castle, or claustrophobic countryside, etc, a concentric space to penetrate, then master):

†Women classically being property, not people, for much of human history. A "truth universally acknowledged," this sorry paradigm suddenly entered dispute, in 1790s Britain; i.e., at the height of the Neo-Gothic period, during Ann Radcliffe's rise to fame: the Great Enchantress/mother of the Gothic novel—meaning after Horace Walpole codified the basic idea in 1764 (notably with castles; re: Bakhtin) and Radcliffe suffused it with "terror" (re: Crawford, 2014). Doing so led to our first blockbuster novelist, a veritable deluge of terror (and Gothic heroines) followed by Catherine Moorland (Austen camping Radcliffe), Jane Eyre, Nancy Drew, Scooby Doo's Velma and legions of similar victim-cop imitators: a curious phenomenon I call "Radcliffe's Refrain" (2025), and one whose curious case, here, carries forward!

"Radcliffe's Refrain" (sample)

A small snippet on Radcliffe and her approach to Gothic fiction, one that proliferated long after her death; re: Gothic heroines/detectives and "demon lovers" per a virgin/whore approach not just to media, but things shaped by media in and out of stories (originally posted as a SFW January 25th book sample on this blog but also appearing in my book series' Demon Module; i.e., in a larger section about detectives, damsels and sex demons, 2025):

(source: Women's Museum of California's "The Mother of Gothic Literature," 2017)

Celebrated for marrying the Romantic and its posturings of the Sublime and nature with a modest, enchanting Gothic, Ann Radcliffe was a rockstar of the early Gothic novel. Often called its "mother" and prone to crossing pens with queer troublemaker, Matthew Lewis, the curious irony with Radcliffe's torturous demon lovers, as described by Cynthia Wolff (re: "The Radcliffean Model," 1979), is how they weren't magical behind her Black Veils. Yet, the banditti of the Great Enchantress did personify the same dark desires more spellbound (and queer) enchanters happily conjured up (re: Lewis). The Final Girl dodging mutilation mid-courtly love also stems from Radcliffe's work, the Gothic heroine/damsel being the original scrapper who would evolve from detective to nep-conservative, peace-through-strength fighter by armoring her virtue from alien forces with brawn. It's black-and-white, Cartesian to the core, and prudish to boot.

To that, whereas Shelley was a bred-to-the-bone radical who embraced the alien and fucked with it/wrote like a bereaved mother and whore, Radcliffe wrote like a virgin* who had no idea what loss or surviving open, punch-the-witch persecution was; i.e., like someone who was afraid of sex/never had it (she was married, but to my knowledge never had kids). Instead, it's something to abject and attack/dissect, because sex = death and rape is around every corner. There's a kernel of truth to her stories, but like all conservatives, Radcliffe completely misses the historical-material critique to perpetuate its symptoms through police force inventing enemies (re: black rape myths). She's the fatal portrait of the Tories, her Gothic immature versus mature.

So if Shelley made demons, then Radcliffe investigated them (without whom there'd be no Scooby Doo [or drug-like Scooby "snacks"] without Radcliffe, or Nancy Drew, The Hardy Boys, Alien, Halloween, Texas Chainsaw, or Murder, She Wrote); if Shelley single-handedly started science fiction, then Radcliffe's novels—starting with The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (1789), and going onto more successful stories like The Romance of the Forest (1791) and The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), canonized the detective story wedded to "respectable" and "successful" Neo-Gothic cliché (e.g., folie-à-deux, or mass hysteria, in The Italian):

Ann Radcliffe was a pioneer of the gothic literary genre. Her inspirations were The Castle of Otranto (1764) by Horace Walpole, often named the first gothic novel; The Old English Baron (1777) by Clara Reeve, and The Recess; Or, a Tale of Other Times (1783–1785) by Sophia Lee (Miles, 2004 4). By the time she published her successful novel, The Romance of the Forest in 1791, gothic fiction was considered "the trash of the circulating libraries" and a "cheap and tawdry form of entertainment" (Townshend 2014). However, Radcliffe was considered to be an exception, she was lauded by her contemporaries as "the Shakespeare of Romance writers" and as "a genius of no common stamp" (Miles, 1995 7; Barbauld, 1810 i). Radcliffe single-handedly changed the gothic novel; it was by her inclusion of original poetry as part of her novels and as epigraphs, as well as her elaborate descriptions of landscapes, that she elevated the form [emphasis, me, for its problematic nature]. Critics agreed that Radcliffe had moulded pre-existing literary components to refine a "new, powerful, and enchanting" genre of literature (Miles, 2004 4) [re: Victoria DeHart's "The Enchanting Ann Radcliffe," 2020].

Radcliffe didn't make monsters; she exposed them—i.e., as false, solving mysteries to turn things back to normal. Her stories manufacture dilemmas whose middle-class solvings always benefit the status quo. For all her skill, she actually kind of sucks. She's not "a nice old lady"; she's an opportunist—one using police language to adopt an air of authority leading her audience around by the nose.

In a nutshell, then, Radcliffe wrote cop fiction with "haunted" houses, venerating private ownership/assimilation (secret princesses), and inventing state enemies through bogus propaganda stories: "White Middle-Class Lady Investigates Whoever Killed the Rich Landowner." As a queer an-Com, I find her writing deeply unsexy because, in the absence of shock, she's lecturing about morals in a PG-grade adventure story that has the same negative effects it would inspire, offstage. It says little of value, but value judges everything. Even the fucking trees have value (eat your heart out, Tolkien)! Even so, it's still useful for putting a finger on the middle class' pulse/desire to scapegoat their victims during Capitalist Realism.

*Violence, for example, is Radcliffe's way of talking about sex through extensive innuendo; i.e., in the language of men, but from a woman's point of view seeing such things as "demonic." It's both not what she's talking about, and a paradoxical form of censorship that points to what she's getting at through associate violence (duels/demonic courtship). It's very virginal—like a comic book nerd who's either never had sex, or is camping the sex she has had to disassociate through demonic shows of force: "I'm not having sexual desires," Sampson might explain to Gregory (and by extension to us), in Romeo and Juliet (1597); "I'm cutting off the heads of the maids! Take in it what sense thou wilt!" (source). I genuinely can't tell with Radcliffe and that's the point; it gives her plausible deniability.

All the same, "demonic" clearly means the side of sexuality that women (for Radcliffe) can "only" experience through actual threat of rape. As such, Radcliffe's knife-dick demon BDSM features black penitents who demonstrably evoke courtly love as the "only way" a girl can experience passion outside legal marriage (which happens after the novel ends): on the receiving end of a lance, carried off on horseback or tied to a tree. Distress and ravishing of the damsel is classic courtship language, which Radcliffe translates to the summoning of demons through her stories to excite her and her readership: wish fulfillment per a Western, abject division with alienated, fetishized things that, per the ghost of the counterfeit, further the abjection process.

Abjection Symposium: Concerning Abjection, Playing with Power, TERFs and Class Betrayal (from a Progressive Nerdy Cis Woman)

Now that you're been "primed," concerning abjection, let's unpack these ideas, mid-symposium; i.e., in ways I'll apply to Watson, during the essay body. To it, I've expanded this section a fair bit (e.g., Parenti, TERFs, and American fascism), highlighting things about Watson we'll return to, deeper in (e.g., cops per Cartesian thought, above). Others we won't, but remain useful, anyways; i.e., obscure terms like "cryptonymy" useful in understanding how to think like a Gothicist (thus punch up at token nerds pretending rebellion: better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven, suckers). Use the hyperlinks to explore topics we and our "Gothic mish-mash" only have time to flirt with, here! "Infinite power, infinite form"; there is always another "castle" to pursue—i.e., while playing with power in some shape or form, mise-en-abyme (re: "Castles in the Flesh").

To account for its conversational approach (and overall size), I've chosen to cut "Concerning Abjection" into smaller pieces; re:

• Food for Thought: Some Older Thesis Work to Chew On
• On Sexy Nerds, Punching Up/Our Larger Focus When Doing So
• Playing with Power (to Further or Reverse Abjection, mid-Cryptonymy)
• TERFs and Betrayal in Duality (Good versus Bad Actors)
• The Big Picture: Fascism, America, and Electoral Politics Tied to Cartesian Thought (a Stage for/to Challenge Bad Actors on)
• Don't Debate Nazis; or, the Importance of Being Mean

Let's condense and combine these ideas, in the symposium, thus give some element of past thesis work; re: as food for thought when critiquing Watson, afterwards!

Food for Thought: Some Older Thesis Work to Chew On

First and foremost, abjection can further or reverse; i.e., to serve state's rights or worker rights in duality (the pimp/profit vs the whore/nature). This happens through modular divisions (and intersections) of class, culture and race, as well privilege/oppression; e.g., myself enjoying relative privilege despite being a minority sex worker (re: a trans woman). In short, I'm an academic and middle-class, thus don't do survival sex work, myself:

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

Instead, I write about it per the abjection process, including a variety of thesis arguments from my larger body of work:

• Re: "Capital sexualizes everything" (source: "Thesis Statement," 2023).
• Re: "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" (source: "A Cruel Angel's Thesis").
• Everything happens according to the usual qualities of capital; i.e., as Cartesian, settler-colonial, and heteronormative (re: "The State: It's Key Tools").
• Those with (more) privilege betray out of convenience, whereas those with (more) oppression betray out of desperation (on a gradient, of course).
• Reactionaries are maximal; moderates and progressives defender more minorities, but nonetheless uphold capital therefore Western Liberalism and Pax Americana as a whole (the Omelas refrain).
• State actors are cops, meaning workers who betray their class, but also cultural and/or race interests while abusing power's many forms, mid-abjection; activists play with power onstage and off to reverse abjection by also playing with power in duality.
• Cops apologize for rape, ergo for capital/the state and fascism by debating Nazis (or the idea of them/fascism at large); activists don't.
• There isn't a monopoly on nerds, and sluts are anisotropic; i.e., insofar as nerds, sex work, poetry (therefore paradox), and revolutionary aren't mutually exclusive/can be nerd cops or rebels depending on where they send power, mid-abjection!

In doing so, I try to include other sexy nerds, some of whom do survival sex work/are oppressed differently than I am; i.e., while punching up together (re: at the status quo Watson defends); e.g., Delilah Gallo, a sex educator herself and staunch activist: "Land back. Free Palestine, Sudan, Congo, Syria, Ethiopia, Cuba, Korea, Vietnam, Hawai'i, Puerto Rico, Turtle Island, Lebanon, and all occupied, oppressed, embargoed land. [...] 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," 2025).

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

On Sexy Nerds, Punching Up/Our Larger Focus When Doing So

Beyond "Concerning Abjection," we'll predominantly utilize a nerdy aesthetic challenging bad actors in slutty ways; i.e., as my friends and I collectively do—meaning in ways I can point you towards, mentioned elsewhere; e.g., exceptionally nerdy but also cool, sexy educators like Mercedes the Muse and her own BDSM-themed approach to Gothic counterculture (where unequal arrangements of power explore taboo themes useful to universal liberation, below): a "wild thing" paradoxically expressing indomitability through the playfully language (and performance) of domination (a "palliative" Numinous, as I call it; re: "The Quest for Power")!

(artist: Mercedes the Muse)

While Gothic Communism is holistic, our larger focus (for the symposium and essay body it belongs to) stays primarily on class betrayal and Cartesian thought; i.e., insofar as Watson—apart from being a STEM nerd (ergo stochastic cop under Cartesian models, within nerd culture)—remains a white cis feminist, not race or queer traitor despite being a class traitor to a matter of degree (a token straight woman). To avoid class reductionism while critiquing Watson's Nancy Drew Syndrome, I'll try to mention elements of race and class betrayal where relevant. If you're interested in a more race-centric approach than either symposium or essay can provide, consider "Is Metal Racist?" and its follow-up, "Replying to Jon Barbas" (2025).

Also, while my praxial focus challenges STEM models (ergo sexism, racism, transphobia, etc)—i.e., through care work, especially sex work within nerd culture—we only have time to introduce these ideas; re: in this list (and its examples, here) primarily being food for thought but also segues to larger bodies of research (so to speak) my essay merely touches on. To see them and their opinions explored through sex workers other than myself, refer again to my Hailing Hellions Q&A series; e.g., Goddess Asterin: "a witchy gentle pleasure domme who worships the Earth and fights for equal rights for all." In other words, nature/whores are things for weird iconoclastic nerds to protect from weird canonical nerds* (and mad science/the STEM fields, Frankenstein onwards): we—but also our exploitation and liberation—all sharing the same spaces of power and playing with it for different aims/sending it flowing towards workers or the state, mis-aesthetic.

(artist: Goddess Asterin)

*A conflict I've previously defined; re:

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 Documents").

Playing with Power (to Further or Reverse Abjection, mid-Cryptonymy)

A cop's a cop, and silence is genocide; so is treating queer folk like their voices don't matter (even when that voice is rightfully angry with someone, as I was with Watson). "We live in Gothic times," indeed, and we (queer folk and other minorities) camp canon, in and out of the disco and its commercial dangers; re: "we camp canon because we must." "Canon" means anything the state polices in duality through abjection; re: pimping nature and those "of it": divisions of class, culture and race, privilege/oppression, and selective imbricating persecution language*, etc—what, for rebellious workers chasing universal liberation through intersectional solidarity/consciousness, reclaims through the language of the alien to hug (or fuck) said alien, mid-dialectic. The spell is one to weave for different aims working, upholding Capitalist Realism or smashing it mid-cryptonymy, "on the Aegis" (re: Hogle's "ghost of the counterfeit"): the whore's revenge, therefore the Gorgon's playing with power (which the state will try to pimp "on a leash" as capital decays under its own Realism, below).

(artist: Claudio Berga)

*Re: blood libel, sodomy and witchcraft accusations, but also Said's Orientalism and similar bigoted modules that alienate/fetishize labor and nature (re: "Idle Hands"). Sex, drugs and rock 'n roll—it all goes into the same pot, one that workers reclaim "on the Aegis" (wherever/whatever the disco is, our mirror shield gleaned from Athena and Medusa being one-in-the-same; re: Creed).

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

Said language normally monopolizes by state actors, onstage and off (re: "The State: Its Key Tools"), and which pro-labor (and nature) workers challenge in duality across all registers; re: my coining of, and work on, ludo-Gothic BDSM and camp/calculated risk putting "rape" in quotes; re: per the whore's revenge against the pimp. There is always a whore to rape, but also worship and fear mid-play (often as "castle," above), reversing abjection under Capitalist Realism: as something to break (from Creed to us; i.e., "her terrifying powers" being to remind the state how fucked it is without her hand in things: "you need me; I don't need you," above). "When the Man comes around, show him your Aegis!" (a series refrain, one I sloganized for my book series finale; re: "It Began with a Whisper"): nature as wild, criminal, irrational, alien, and any such label for "other" that—far from being a weakness, mid-abjection—becomes a means of where power is stored, mid-performance; i.e., to such an awesome degree as to paradoxically reverse abjection during the whore's revenge (re: "Notes on Power"): the witch, banshee or Gorgon fighting fire with fire "when in Rome," such vessels (and their forbidden fruits (ergo knowledge and pleasure, below) burning Rome to the ground by humanizing the harvest (doing so with/taking back the very peach-like stuff of nature [and sex work] the state greedily devours; re: "Nature Is Food")! 

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

Class war is ass war, babes: not a state division of revolutionary action and (a)sexuality/public nudism policing play to further abjection, but an ongoing performance capable of tremendous poetic sway (thus socio-material change) dialectically-materially reversing abjection during de facto (extracurricular) education (sex or otherwise); i.e., versus the usual prudes pimping us (those who control power while policing playtime with power in all its forms)! Whores set themselves free; i.e., by knowing the score but camping the canon in duality anyways; e.g., like Eartha Kitt, saying "I don't wanna be chaste, I wanna be evil" (1953): subverting the aesthetics of power and death, but also what is punishable by death through state models normally pimping unpaid with paid labor (and paid modes of revolutionary discourse, per Cartesian thought, excluding sex and care work to serve the motives of productivity and profit; re: me vis-à-vis Patel and Moore, in "Raising Awareness"). Teamwork makes the dream work, the ability to listen to other oppressed parties—also healing from rape while formulating a pedagogy of the oppressed conducive to developing a post-scarcity world—a vital skill (and one that Watson appears to lack, as we shall see).

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

To it, the way out of capital's labyrinthine occurs inside itself, the cryptonymy process reversing abjection behind buffers serving as preferential code (re: "Transgressive Nudism"); i.e., by using the very things the state normally chains workers up with: sex and force as "mere play" (darkness visible) paradoxically recoding the Superstructure. It's not "random," at all, then, but conductive to socio-material change (re: "On Twin Trees," 2023)—a form of playful disguise cloaking animal magnetism, the whore's revenge achieving exhibit and lesson through asymmetrical warfare (re: ass war "on the Aegis"). During Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism, so do rebellious whores embody the Numinous; i.e., as something to quest for*, thus have all the power our jailors anisotropically fear/want to control. Direction (flow), not aesthetic, determines how power functions, furthering or reversing indicating where power is sent:

*The modern Prometheus, as Shelley put it, aka the Promethean Quest (which I discuss in my PhD as a palliative Numinous, reversing abjection during ludo-Gothic BDSM; re: "The Quest for Power").

(artist: Aria Rain)

TERFs and Betrayal in Duality (Good versus Bad Actors) 

Canon vs camp boils down to good actors vs bad, cops vs the oppressed. Good actors can camp canon in different ways, "on the Aegis" (through the Gothic idea of personifying warring ideas of the monstrous-feminine; i.e., Amazonomachia, or "monster battle" as a theatrical "psychomachy" [mind battle] that speaks to dialectical-material exchanges over space and time). That being said, state powers can further abjection to different degrees, too—with reactionary TERFs being more maximalist/"knives out" and more moderate, progressive-presenting bigots like Rebecca Watson punching selectively down, mid-betrayal; i.e., at someone marginalized for whom they perceive (ergo treat) as alien and irrational, therefore unthinking and abject (refer to "Raising Awareness" for a deeper look into this concept, but also my book series; e.g., "Reversing Abjection" and "Non-Magical Damsels and Detectives," 2025). Furthered by bad actors, abjection remains a process of demonization (and undeath, chattelization) impeaching some workers (and nature); i.e., as things to devalue for their unruly but also automatically enslaved character per Cartesian models and their typical betrayals: the whore something to love and hate through Gothic canon pimping nature, mid-abjection and, again, in duality. Always.

(artist: Vera Dominus)

This duality is always present because betrayal isn't a given (class or otherwise) and monopolies are impossible. For example, my friend Vera (above) is a queer country girl from Gay Philly I've interviewed alongside many care workers doubling as activists versus TERFs; re: my "Hailing Hellions" Q&A series): treating Medusa as a vice-character pirate to battle, dragon to chase, gay to bury, freak to show, bug to dissect, etc—all by the usual "rational" parties scared to death of death/nature's revenge: Cartesian (wo)men pimping nature out of desperation and convenience, and generally as something to dominate per Cartesian models haunting capital-in-decay presently! We reclaim what these traitors pimp on the Aegis, both sharing the same stages of play mid-Amazonomachia (a cryptomimetic site of madness and replication; e.g., T2, 1991—below).

In any event, abjection = running away from something as much as attacking it to betray one's class (culture and race) in any direct, obvious way (so-called "micro-aggressions")—something Watson is guilty of, herself. Whereas open, self-confessed TERFs further abjection during mirror syndrome (or virgin/whore, etc), those with Nancy Drew Syndrome prey on minorities in more moderate ways (white or otherwise); i.e., apologizing for empire (and punching down at criticism of empire) while doing plenty of solid activism, themselves. There are no perfect abusers, and stochastic policework isn't always violent; it's often a simple act of superiority over others more marginalized, white cis women being a classic example of this versus trans people—not targeting them for violence, per se, but ignoring their voices for not being being "rational" or "scientific" enough, "on the Aegis." So do cis women historically compartmentalize—in short, acting "like men"; i.e., inside Plato's cave, the Man Box, etc, despite their oppressed class, culture and/or racial interests: as marginalized people policing minorities, triangulating tremendous amounts of state force, mid-delusion (that only they are oppressed, below).

Token reprisals are the fate of many queer people, we gays suffering the moderate bigotry (and material outcomes) of any feminism that refuses to intersect; i.e., when facing angry criticism from the usual victims, specifically of state power treating us like "madness" to discredit, dismiss, or otherwise devalue under Capitalist Realism. Or as Winston Wolf said, in Pulp Fiction (1995), "If I'm curt with you, buster, it's because time is a factor"; i.e., I don't have time for bullshit, and civility politics is bullshit. "So, pretty-please with sprinkles on top," stop tip-toeing around Joe Biden/the establishment by scapegoating Graham Platner! Yeah, he sucks; the establishment sucks more and voting is basically bare-fucking-minimum, at this point—not even, when many workers generally vote against their own interests!

The Big Picture: Fascism, America, and Electoral Politics Tied to Cartesian Thought (a Stage for/to Challenge Bad Actors on)

I digress, while electoral politics can reduce harm—and should absolutely aid those aims whenever possible—the system is still designed to divide and harm workers in bad. To that, "progressive" politicians are of the establishment, which continues the same abuses conducted previously by Western Liberalism under Pax Americana for centuries; i.e., from laissez-faire to Bretton Woods to neoliberalism and the so-called "end of history" (my ass). Regardless of the place, time and economic period, American "progressives" remain historically constant: never radical enough to challenge fascism, ergo rape. To it, John Fetterman sold out, Graham Platner's a Nazi mercenary and AOC and Bernie Sanders—for all the hoopla surrounding their names—are little more than Zionism dressed up (e.g.,  Northstar Radio's "Why I Can No Longer Support AOC" and GDF's "The Bernie Sanders Betrayal," 2025)!

(cited: "Accommodated/Assimilated Minorities, part two: Trans TERFs, NERFs, and Queer Bosses")

Hell, even after Mamdani won his mayoral race in New York, Chuck Schumer and the Democratic party turned right back around and sold everyone down the river... only to be rescued by so-called "progressives" (e.g., The Humanity Report's "WTF: Progressive Democrats Swoop in to SAVE Schumer & Jeffries in Baffling Move," 2025); i.e., their own approach fascism with more "gobstopper" masks/concentric veneers (above)! Betrayal is betrayal, workers for or against state power using the same masks for different aims: flow (of power) determines function, not aesthetic. In turn, power aggregates to serve itself while adding or removing masks, as needed; the establishment betrays by design, and anyone who says (or acts) otherwise is either high off their ass, blind to history as it actually occurs ("the memory of states," said Howard Zinn, quoting Kissinger) and/or complicit; re:

(source thumbnail: "Graham Platner is an Embarrassing Liar")

This is not new—predating America, in fact; e.g., Watson declaring "we have to do better" in her aforementioned Platner video (above), effectively doing so despite her usage of "we" largely venerating ruling-class mechanisms; i.e., lifted—whether by accident or on purpose—from Descartes' notion of "Society"; re: "The era's ruling classes saw most human beings—women, peoples of color, Indigenous Peoples—as extended, not thinking, beings" (source: Seven Cheap Things).

(exhibit 0: Top-right: source skeet, vanderWaardart: November 15th, 2025; source YouTube comments section, bottom: "Graham Platner is an Embarrassing Liar")

Indeed, "nerds" tied to capital and state power predate modern fascism, which they historically decayed into (from Shelley's Frankenstein, onwards; re: "Celebrating Mary Shelley's Immortal Legacy" when critiquing fascism and its spectres [with mad science] before Marx, 2025). And if that seems like a bit of a stretch, Watson—as we'll see—was rather quick to dismiss me, TERF-style, as "unthinking" (on YouTube) and "illiterate" (on Bluesky). And sure, the above snippets point to an admittedly unproductive clash, one had between two vain-if-intelligent women on a public forum. The fact remains, my critique still stands: Watson's ability to spot or handle fascism frankly blows (e.g., me, above, citing her 2024 video, whose own title and deeply problematic premise I clearly dislike/disagree with*; see: exhibit 1, in "Punching Down; or, Watson's Moderate Transphobia"). Gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss!

*Forget the voting class "choosing" fascism, in 2024. America—having borrowed from the Enlightenment and Cartesian dualism—has always been fascist by design, the ruling class largely aristocrat con men with bourgeois, anti-Democratic schemes; e.g., Tad Stoermer's "Stop Worshipping the Founding Fathers—They Designed the American System to Screw You" (2025) and Non Compete's "The Dark Truth About America's Founding Fathers" (sharing Michael Parenti's lecture on the American ruling class conceding the Bill of Rights to middle-class American workers, 2025); i.e., "a false rebellion serving the same old moneyed interests" (re: Parenti, 1997) that capital both historically decays into (re: Dutt, 1935) and in many modular ways (re: Eco, 1995). The same is also true of nation-states more broadly but I digress (re: "Raising Awareness"). As a Gothicist, I study how capital/the state decays to camp it; re: during ludo-Gothic BDSM through capital/the state's generational trauma, ergo chattelization of nature as monstrous-feminine (virgin/whore) from the start: "Nature Is Food" for state hubris under the Capitalocene, pushing devastatingly towards state shift (re: Patel and Moore). To simply say "we chose fascism in 2024," then, is to ignore said history—a disastrously blind strategy enacted by open liberals/those calling themselves "progressives" typically downplaying America's role as a fascist nation the entire time. So while all nation-states have fascist elements to some degree, America/global US hegemony under Pax Americana is where modern fascism stems from; i.e., from neo-Nazis to cryptofascists to TERFs and SWERFs (so-called "fascist feminism," as I put it†; re: "Girl Bosses, Male Gatekeepers, and the Gender-Critical Movement" written in 2022 and published in 2025).

†Borrowing from Judith Butler (and later from Silvia Federici, in "Whores Policing Whores," 2024); re:

(exhibit 100a1: Artist, bottom: Katy's Cartoons. Not everyone can draw well; the root context is what matters, not its ornamentation.)

Note: Sex Positivity started as a critique of the TERF movement in popular media. This subchapter contains much of my early writing of TERFs; i.e., focusing on their brand of fascism extensively and at a time when I was watching Essence of Thought's coverage on TERFs, as well. —Perse, 5/5/2025

As stated during the introduction, TERFs are fascists-in-disguise. They think they're good, righteous, victims (re: the "good" monstrous-feminine as under attack by "evil" trans people). Described as such by Judith Butler (Emanuel Maiberg's "Why The Guardian Censored Judith Butler on TERFs," 2021), the genderqueer icon notes how TERFs are "one of the dominant strains of fascism in our times." They will not be there to help, but commit genocide against trans people as a marginalized group [called that one]. Indeed, as cryptofascists, TERFs deceptively posture as moderates under neoliberalism, an ideology that aids and abets the very reactionary abuses Butler fights against: "racism, nationalism, xenophobia, [carceral] violence, [femicide and the] high rates of attacks on trans and genderqueer people." TERFs commit all of these through varied obscurantism: an assortment of monstrous, undead/demonic disguises and deceptions (source: "Girl Bosses").

To that, I really don't care what Watson calls herself, or if she called me this-or-that term on its own; I do care that she did so in connection to my activism regarding both our jailors—Watson abjecting me, TERF-style, to defend her own image and the establishment, thereby taking it easy on Biden ten months into Trump's second presidency (a similar move to Ian Kochinski [above] also apologizing for Biden—with he and other "progressives" [e.g., Natalie Wynn] loudly asking people to vote Biden, in 2020; i.e., "hold your nose" and vote, as described by Non Compete's "MARX WAS RIGHT: Graham Platner Proves Entryism is DOOMED" and Socialism for All's "Do Socialists Run in Capitalist Political Parties? | Hasan Piker's 'Vaush Moment' for Graham Platner," 2025)! Submission is submission, silence our doomsday.

Don't Debate Nazis; or, the Importance of Being Mean

Debating fascism is to allow fascism, thus invite our executioners inside. To this, I could've been nice to Watson when calling her out (and her own four-eyed ignorance/"progressive" appeal to authority). Instead, I chose to treat her like I would anyone/anywhere, especially in an academic setting where people have thicker skin. I really don't suffer hypocrites. Nor do I especially enjoy dealing with smugly entitled assholes looking for an apology they didn't earn; i.e., while fascism runs rampant and the planet literally burns, Nero-style, to their tune—all while Watson herself openly prescribes civility politics, acting high-and-mighty despite being caught in, as far as I'm concerned, a bit of a lie. That's where she lashed out, and where I have her token ass "on the hip." Glasses and a snarky disposition only get you so far, Watson. Eventually the aesthetic has to function in universally pro-worker ways; i.e., by moving power away from the elite (and their nerdy Cartesian thieves categorically dominating planet Earth). Otherwise, it's just bourgeois calling itself "progressive" (and whose division of reason and madness is merely Cartesian dualism, pimping nature in all the usual nerdy [white, straight, European] ways; i.e., that TERFs emulate to varying degrees):

(source: Skepticon)

This ain't my first rodeo, Watson, and I won't simply "trust you" at face value when you act the fool. Furthermore, there's no monopoly on weird nerdy activism or its cryptonymy/aesthetic (which "Girl Bosses, Male Gatekeepers, and the Gender-Critical Movement" also critiques; e.g., Dawkins and deGrasse Tyson's rape apologia/rape—nerds historically being of the owner class)! So does capital make workers eat but also investigate themselves in duality/dialectical-material struggle, assimilation poor stewardship (and Amazons historically being token cops, but I digress; re: "Confronting Past Wrongs," 2025). This includes in revolutionary circles where trans folk have historically been out-groups to sacrifice by more privileged nerdy women aping Pygmalion as "Nancy Drew": a token playing at "Goldilocks" rebellion (re: Radcliffe)—someone whose view of the situation has warped into praxially inert, even outright predatory forms (which we'll get to; i.e., when we compare your milder transphobia to my abusive female scientist ex's more aggressive varieties, in "Punching Down")! We—and by "we" I mean you, Watson—can do better! Indict the system and heads of state, followed by the prison guard making himself an easy target (re: Platner)!

Again, we'll get to all of that. For now, merely remember the system (capital or the state) relies on abjection by design; i.e., tokenizing labor through largely empty promises of assimilation, working on false hope to abject naysayers through tokenism: "gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss" trying to "kill" home rule with kindness (which controlled opposition effectively is)! As such, de facto state defenders will call us "violent," no matter what we do. That starts historically with dehumanizing labor as "unthinking" and "illiterate," as Watson treated me: "Some people are not ready to be unplugged, are so hopelessly dependent on the system that they will fight to defend it" (above). It seems innocent, but a prison is a prison; "hysteria" = moral panics tied to "terrorism" being a Neo-Gothic invention, one arbitrated by female cops; re: me in "Radcliffe's Refrain" vis-à-vis Crawford's "invention of Gothic terrorism" and Zinn's concept of middle-class concessions (from 1790s Britain and early America, onwards). Whoever's doing it, a cop's a cop (or agents, to borrow from The Matrix and similar stories [e.g., Alice in Borderland, above] critiquing capital; re: "The World Is a Vampire"). Furthermore, such things historically-materially arbitrate across class, cultural and racial lines, but also ratios of privilege and oppression to varying degrees and qualities.

To that, abjection occurs through the establishment, therefore capital and state power as heteronormative, Cartesian and settler-colonial (re: "The State: Its Key Tools"). In turn, cis men police cis women, cis women police trans women, the gentry police the masses, the literate police the "illiterate," whores police whores (and so on), all to further abjection—meaning to modular degrees of normal-to-token betrayal. I'm not Watson's enemy in this respect, but I am her critic—specifically of someone who's policing me versus the other way around; i.e., Watson policing her trans critic, said critic (me) publicly describing how she, Watson, didn't hold the Clinton, Obama and Biden administrations, etc, accountable enough when talking about "choosing fascism"; re: the ruling class having paved the way for Trump's first and second terms (with Democrat help), ergo their victimization of different minorities regardless of votes cast. This includes trans youths being categorically denied healthcare, meaning through decades-old bipartisanship coming transphobically home to roost: the establishment removing our healthcare on a state level through federal threats of force. I'm not gonna blame voters, here, because voting is largely moot; I'm gonna blame (and critique) the system, first and foremost (the source of rape)!

(re: source: Eli Newman's "Out of reach: Where do Michigan’s trans youth go for care now?" 2025; cited: "Raising Awareness").

Critiquing Watson: Essay Body

As we proceed, I give credit where credit is due. In Watson's eyes, however, I'm simply incapable of critical thought—both "unthinking" and "illiterate," mid-abjection: "hysteria" being the classic phrase used by men of science against women, followed by cis women versus trans folk outside the STEM fields (my abuser was a woman and a scientist who apologized for Biden, which we'll get to in "Explaining My Thought Process"). In other words, if you scratch a "progressive," no matter how polite or reasoned she seems, a TERF/SWERF often bleeds; i.e., cis women, past and present, classically police trans folk as "uppity" for the state—their doing so unfolding in a reactionary-to-moderate gradient of problematic behaviors (meaning things meriting criticism from oppressed groups).

Some Other Things to Remember

Before we get to Watson in earnest, here's a few things to bear in mind: "It is possible to enjoy something and indeed necessary to critique its pernicious aspects," Anita Sarkeesian once said. While she was talking about Gamergate and videogames being problematic, the same concept applies to literally anything. In Sarkeesian's ballpark, someone like Brianna Wu—another member of the Gamergate troupe (shown next to Rebecca Watson for comedic purposes, below)—wound up betraying the cause pretty goddamn hard (second image down). To that, it's possible to critique power to a matter of degree and still be wrong about different things; i.e., things that may or may not apply to whatever topic someone elevates themselves with. As such, "broken clock" and "can't see the forest for the trees" are both phrases that exist for this very reason, describing such people while having different ratios of correct:incorrect.

(source screencap, top: Rebecca Watson's "So I'm in the Epstein Files," 2025; cited, bottom: Ally Gibbs' "Let's talk about Brianna Wu," 2025)

This brings me to Rebecca Watson. Less a total traitor like Brianna Wu is

(source skeet, Katelyn Burns: November 1st, 2025)

Watson's also less of a broken clock, for example, than Bad Empanada; i.e., someone who's wrong a metric ton/has fascist tendencies lining up down the street, but still admittedly does solid postcolonial work (re: "Raising Awareness," 2025). Instead, Watson's more someone who, despite being absolutely right about tons of smaller things, still can't see the larger historical-material trends at work; re: the forest for the trees. She, for lack of a better term (or purely because I feel like devising my own), remains a cis white girl with Nancy Drew Syndrome; re: "problematic" for being moderately transphobic as a progressive would, and which we'll now unpack; i.e., betrayal takes many forms, no two nerds exactly alike in that respect—Wu being a token trans woman eating crow (above) and Watson being a white "progressive" with moderately transphobic tendencies apologizing for rape.

Again, we'll get to that. For now, just remember that my critiques aren't of any given aesthetic, here, (e.g., four-eyed nerdy white women, two images up), but rather how aesthetic (or political identity tied to aesthetic) is considerably less important than someone's function; re: regarding power as anisotropic, hence what direction they move power towards/away from: workers or the state. Watson's transphobic, whether she cares to admit it or not, serving state models in problematic ways that aren't above reproach.

I Like Watson's Overall Work

Keeping all of this in mind, I actually enjoy Watson's work quite a bit. In fact, I've cited her multiple times before, and even in pieces that were foundational to larger concepts I would further develop; i.e., after my PhD and into my larger book series; e.g., her video on Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel (1997), which I took and applied to my own concept, "canonical essentialism," when combating Fisher's Capitalist Realism:

(source screencap*: "A Note About Canonical Essentialism," 2024)

*Excuse the formatting gaffs; they occurred when transferring my old blog to WordPress, and I haven't had time to fix them!

This is precisely why I felt bothered when noticing something rather annoying about Watson; re: back in November 2024 and then in November 2025—something that is, in fact, rather typical of progressives (moderates with more masks, white or not): that they apologize for the state, albeit in their own roundabout way. Again, glasses and a snarky disposition will only get you so far, Watson. Time for a new prescription?

In other words, I suddenly felt rather confused when dealing with someone ostensibly like me, and whose work I consumed and absorbed into my own; i.e., someone I thought should be able to read the room but couldn't, regarding fascism (therefore rape). How could someone seemingly on the right side of history apologize for the state, therefore rape on a systemic level? Or, put differently, how could such a resplendently snarky know-it-all like Rebecca Watson possibly be wrong? God forbid, right? Yet, hubris is hubris, and coming from someone who's been wrong plenty of times in the past, myself, it's a feeling I know well! You see, I, too, am something of a snarky bitch; but unlike Watson, I can actually admit when I'm wrong.

To that, my mistake was taking such matters to YouTube comments or Bluesky replies, at all; i.e., when I could have written them in a place that's less anonymous (and yes, balanced in Watson's favor). Allow me to rectify that, here, doing so by talking about her problematic aspects to a fuller degree. Such "salvage" is academia, truth be told; i.e., "Fuck you, you're wrong. Let's go get a beer!" but also "Bitch, you ain't seen nothing yet!" Holding people accountable like that—especially public intellectuals who say we should hold other people accountable (as Watson does)—is all part of the abjection process; re: reversing it water-off-a-duck's-ass. There's always gonna be a certain amount of stress during activism, eustress or healthy stress being fine provided it doesn't boil over (too much). And even if it does (this piece being something constructive resulting from something deconstructive), that's still a chance to "burn Rome"; i.e., I like showing people their own ass "on the Aegis," especially Nancy Drews like Rebecca Watson who paradoxically apologize for modern-day Rome and its rapists (so-called "Caesars," Biden and Trump or otherwise).

Watson's Curious Case: Nancy Drew Syndrome

(source: DC Comics' "Scooby Apocalypse," 2020; cited: "Radcliffe's Refrain," 2025)

I'm an iconoclast, by trade—that, and I'd rather be obnoxious or outspoken than quiet when it counts ("the silence of our friends," as MLK puts it). To reiterate, that's what Nancy Drews do, and Watson has Nancy Drew Syndrome; re: defending the establishment through token milquetoast criticism, or acting like a white progressive cop to further abjection (thus rape). First—and returning to wrong and right as things to be—the phrase "wrong" operates relative to Watson's work, ergo the syndrome being discussed/applied, here; i.e., she investigates others for their wrongdoing, not her own. Think Scooby Doo and imagine Velma and the kids being the villains. For them, "villain" isn't the cartoonishly evil, low-hanging-fruit sort; it's the higher-hanging position that such privileged people enjoy while punching down in disguise. Can Velma and her trusted friends actually be wrong in these stories?

As a matter of fact, they can. Yes, they remain correct (more or less) about copious little things, but in the end are still guilty of venerating capital by not getting to the heart of the larger issues at work: by scapegoating the state-in-small, doing so through problematic refrains, mise-en-abyme, that aren't restricted to "the trash of the circulating libraries" (re: me vis-à-vis Townshend; see: "Radcliffe's Refrain"). The problem with such persons anywhere is—much like Radcliffe's pirates convincing people they're ghosts to rob the local gentry blind—people like Velma and, Rebecca Watson by extension, are guilty of their own "spectral enchantments": the absurd myth they can never be wrong when investigating rape. They're cops, not rebels, and ACAB:

While we've mentioned this phenomena alongside Radcliffe and Velma in the past (e.g., Stranger Things [2016] and its own TERF-style Red Scare, above), here let's call it "Nancy Drew Syndrome": the chosen white cis girls of privilege who are destined, apparently, to always be right while investigating "rape"; i.e., because of their special blend of privilege/oppression, out of the Neo-Gothic into the present space and time. They're right as much through posture and selection as a means of canonical dogma: the story needs a hero and the mystery to solve is, from the Neo-Gothic period into the present neoliberal one, meant for a white cis girl (the Gothic heroine classically a detective, per Radcliffe's aforementioned refrain). Such people can apparently critique others all the live-long day and be celebrated for it (or self-celebrated, with Watson patting herself repeatedly on the back; re: "So I'm in the Epstein Files").

Veneration in the face of aversity is to be expected. However, if you don't draw any useful wider conclusions to said critiques—meaning conclusions conducive to meaningful change on a larger systemic level reducing rape, overall—then it doesn't really add up to much. There must be struggle, Watson, and criticism is necessary lest you fall under your own spell—again, what Hogle calls "the ghost of the counterfeit." Indeed, I would call it a form of fence-sitting. It might not seem like it—especially if one spends all their time polishing their reputation; e.g., Watson plastering herself with dubious labels like "progressive," dying ignominously on said hill—but that's still what's going on, here: a series of circular novelettes, the perpetual debutante stuck tragically "saving the day" first in tragedy and then in farce (re: Marx); i.e., versus doing things that beeline post-scarcity—again, a cop but a particular kind of cop apologizing for rape by not going for the source. That's what white moderates are, including more progressive ones that—through a failure to self-criticize when faced with angry-if-valid criticism from minority responders—actually punch down at those speaking truth to power!

Punching Down; or, Watson's Moderate Transphobia

Nancy Drew apologies for rape, mid-abjection—including transphobia when trans people speak about rape harder than Nancy does. To it, the moment I called Watson out for not going hard enough versus Biden, she attacked me as a good cop (or witch cop) might; re: moderately from behind her otherwise good works. And fair enough, I wasn't polite—ostensibly just a random nobody in a YouTube comments section with a bone to pick. Mea culpa. But I also wasn't wrong and had the receipts to back it up. Here, for example, I specifically call Watson out for her inability to historically critique Joe Biden specifically for his own crimes of office—once in November 2024 after he lost and America "chose" fascism, followed by a handful of days ago:

(exhibit 1: Source skeet, left: vanderWaardart: November 13th, 2025; right: ibid.; middle-top, comments to Rebecca Watson's "Graham Platner is an Embarrassing Liar"; middle-bottom: Rebecca Watson's "The US Chose Fascism. Where Do We Go From Here?")

"Hurt, not harm." And having used Watson for my scratching post, I found her prudish, snooty blood to bleed more TERF-y/fascist than I expected. Indeed, her stuffy response was telling for precisely that reason. Despite me saying who I was (and having a YouTube channel however small that Watson could check, let alone 18+ Bluesky account she would later respond to, below), she only doubled down; i.e., by insisting how she was always "extremely tough on Biden." Yet, here she was, defending rapists like him and race traitors like Kamala Harris, anyways; i.e., from a (far more) outspoken critic of rape, like myself. Call me whatever you like, so long as you agree that rape is bad and shouldn't be apologized for on any level. By attacking the critic, not the criticism, Watson was dismissing my argument; re: by calling me illiterate/unable to think critically about my area of expertise; i.e., regarding people like Biden (and those who defend them). Alrighty, then!

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

Let's be fair to our Gothic heroine, and shift our focus from sexual abuse to racism (a form of rape per my definition, but I digress). Watson could spot racism, for example, mentioning that people were racist and sexist towards Kamala (who's racist and sexist, herself; read: a token cop). Never mind how the Dems chose Kamala to be their stooge for Biden, a man who—apart from being accused multiple times of rape by different women (and #MeToo being coopted by white women from non-white women)—was responsible for decades of racist behavior dating back to the early 1970s. He also funded the police aggressively during BLM, the former a racist institution—say nothing of the unusual amount of support he gave to Israel before, during and after October 7th, 2023; i.e., despite anti-racist lip service sprinkled throughout his career (e.g., his outspoken stance on Apartheid, in 1986). Did it ever occur to Watson that the Democrats didn't want to win, largely because it's their job to lose and has been since the 1970s (and long before that, to be frank)? Yet, here Watson is, sounding simultaneously self-assured; i.e., that she is both totally correct and somehow born yesterday regarding such matters:

(source skeet, ScottPB: November 15th, 2025)

A "progressive" is just a white (or token) liberal with more hats—Nancy Drew wearing plenty while apologizing for rape, herself. In short, Biden's a racist sexist man accused of rape, but Watson is the middle-class woman appealing to American, therefore Western Liberal values under Pax Americana. When asking us, post hoc, to have voted for Kamala, his chosen successor-in-crime (and only at the last possible second, mind you), she's once again asking us to "hold our nose" lest we, in her words, "choose fascism." This is white moderacy 101—not just rape apologia as I frame it, but the very "enemy of progress" MLK warned about in 1963  (re: "Letter from Birmingham Jail") and Butler in 2021 (re: TERFs).

Again, the US government has always been fascist—meaning built on genocide to decay towards—and for Watson to somehow act like Biden isn't fascist is to foolishly try and whitewash the entire system (and its rape), then and now (swap Biden out for Obama, Clinton, Lincoln, etc, and my point still stands). APAB, and she's got Nancy Drew Syndrome real bad; re: "some people are so hopelessly dependent on the system that they will fight to defend it," including cis "progressive" women punching down, mid-abjection, to whitewash tyrants; re: like white moderates (and token examples) historically do: at the whore, especially the queer whore. Easier to attack the person not in the cave than the cave, itself (above); re: Watson inadvertently confirming my critique when using her power to lash out, demonstrating said criticisms not through her aesthetic (at least on its own), but her actions while defending the state, Nancy-Drew-style. A TERF's a TERF, a cop's a cop (and obviously male nerds can be cops, too; re: Solomon Nelson, below)!

To that, Watson's behavior, mid-abjection, mirrors how Skip Intro describes The West Wing (1999): "a reverence for American government" ("The West Wing Can't Save Us," 2025; timestamp: 19:54). It's precisely why I brought the smoke that I did—attacking her not just for her Biden apologia, but for her hypocritical stance on Platner. In other words, she'd treat Biden and Kamala with kid gloves (two cops, therefore rapists), but then scapegoat the very kind of man who toured not just under Bush Jr. and Cheney's presidency/vice presidency, but also Obama and Biden's. Call me crazy, but shouldn't we critique the office that hired men like Platner, not throw him and him alone under the bus? Rapists are taught and enabled by other rapists; i.e., in vertical power structures (and their criminogenic conditions), but also moderate transphobia (and other bigotries) happening anywhere. In YouTube comments or in private, rape—as enabled and furthered by apologizers for rape—is not something I treat lightly or take lying down!

(source: Annika Brockschmidt's "Senate Candidate Graham Platner Claims Ignorance of Nazi Tattoo," 2025)

Yet, Watson's response was to apparently assume that I—however prickly I came across—disagreed with her video's basic premise; i.e., that Nazis are somehow bad and we shouldn't defend them (courtesy of my Holocaust survivor grandfather). Except I said "Nazis suck" (more or less) in my initial response; re:

As a trans woman academic and sex worker (emphasis, me), it's been both disheartening and unsurprising to see so many "progressives" defend a literal Nazi mercenary who served in the War on Terror and worked for Blackwater after Trump AND his initial tours. So it's nice to see you critique him. Though I will say, you haven't critiqued the establishment electorate nearly hard enough in the past (re: Joe Biden). Kind of a mixed bag from you, but at least you're not defending Platner, so yay, I guess.

Instead of reading that and responding "logically" herself, Watson responded a bit like my ex did; re: a genderfluid neoliberal TERF/SWERF in the STEM fields who preferred to treat me as "irrational," meaning despite my expertise:

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

However "expected" this response is, DARVO is DARVO and bigotry is bigotry. That's the lesson, you see. Let's further unpack that; i.e., per my general thought process, thus how I consider Watson's furthering of abjection: by framing me as "hysterical," "illiterate," and "uncritical" in my thought process, attacking said process despite its critiquing of rape apologia at large.

Explaining My Thought Process 

I'm not accusing Watson of acting exactly like my rapist. But the two—both nerds in the STEM fields with moderate, TERF-style tendencies—responded pretty poorly to criticism, from my point of view. I criticized Lindsay (and Joe Biden) during Covid, and Watson in 2024 and 2025 after Biden and the Dems reliably lost; i.e., because they'd rather give power to fascists than change anything to help workers (thus rape victims). Respect is earned, and Watson had lost mine by refusing to do anything but ask me to kiss her ass. So, having left my copy of Jane Austen at home (a novel of manners), I repeated my original stance more firmly than before, and she blocked me for it/ran from criticism. You're only proving my point, honey:

(source skeet, vanderWaardart: November 17th, 2025)

Before the block, Watson did what Lindsay also did; i.e., she not only responded by doubling down, but also by tone-policing and ultimately gaslighting me for being "unable to think critically" unlike her—treating me like someone who hasn't punched up her entire adult life versus the state and its abuses, including my six books on the subject (and essays and interviews, afterwards). Strangers abjecting me? Story of my life! Yet, much to my chagrin, I had close friends—my best friend, in fact—tell me this was "stupid internet drama"; i.e., that it was partly my fault for treating Watson like an enemy (for attacking her political identity). And sure, that's fair! I'm not polite and my trauma at the hands of past abusers (women or not) largely steered my conduct; i.e., as much as my scholastic education, the two going hand-in-hand, onstage and off (with YouTube comments a kind of stage).

However, while I understood my best friend's argument and respect them a great deal, I also didn't/don't see the disagreement had between Watson and I how they (a fellow trans person) did:

I like to think I went in half-cocked but one hand [still] on the wheel. She also called me illiterate. I dunno. Just touched a nerve. And then her asking me to apologize when I critiqued her fairly, past and present. Like, no, I'm not apologizing to someone who's response to valid criticism is, "lol, you're illiterate and don't know how to think critically." The point is the expectation that she vocalized on her channel: "Gee, I hope he'll keep his word." And I see that kind of shit from so-called "progressives" all the time. If she or you or anyone else wants to vote, go ahead. I'm talking about public discourse, here. But to hear them talk about the guy like he has any shred of decency or honor when he's a rapist and genocidal member of the executive branch, and has been [working in Congress] for [over] forty years.

I think when you're an educator [as Watson is], Biden should be addressed in ways that confront the reality of who someone is putting hope into; i.e., the topic of [Watson's first] video was "the US chose fascism" in November 2024 and I'm like, "Honey, he's been funding the Palestinian genocide for over a year, and the Democrats [before him] since 1948." That and, "the US chose fascism" [is] a title [that] bothered me, at the time (because, well, the Dems are fascism-lite), but seeing Watson talk about Platner with bite but not an elected official [also] frankly rubbed me the wrong way. Like, where was that bite a year ago?

Rebecca's done plenty of good work, too. I've cited them. But that doesn't make them exempt from criticism. [...] and if [her] initial response is to shut down and call me out for being illiterate—to attack me for the work I do that Biden shit on for his entire political career—then I guess fuck [her and the white knights riding into defend her, below]

(source skeets, Rodriguez: November 13th and 15th, 2025)

Indeed, I slept on it, thought about it, and arrived at the same conclusion I previously did, several days ago: "rape is wrong and shouldn't be apologized for, capital/the state raping by design versus 'having failed' or 'being broken.'" Likewise, anger isn't invalid as a form of criticism. To it, I'd rather give vigorous criticism to Watson as I saw it, because I thought she'd actually be able to own up to it because that's what academics do, angry or not; i.e., I was treating her like a friend, specifically an ally to criticize through rudeness: showing her how I felt as the Gorgon might, reversing abjection. Watson chose the "high" road, tone-policing me as a pimp might (a white moderate tactic). She really wanted that apology before I took her seriously. Indeed, she basically turned into Otto from A Fish Called Wanda (on the hip, below—1988): "Don't call me stupid!" "Well, why on earth not?"

Frankly I've been through too much shit to kiss anyone's ass, and that's basically what I said at the time; i.e., because Watson was functionally acting—in the heat of the moment—like a token progressive, therefore pimp abjecting my rude ass while being unable to hold state power (thus rape) accountable, herself. And yet, she'll have so many videos yay-deep into Trump's presidency describing how wonderful she is (e.g., "So I'm in the Epstein Files," 2025). I'm not impressed; i.e., speaking as someone who's being attacked by the state and asked, when my feet are being held to the coals*, to "be more rational"; re: by someone like Watson who should know better but clearly cares more about her own image (and America's) than being called a hypocrite for good reason. And the paradox, here, is people can do good things, be wonderful in certain ways, and still make mistakes that undermine their activism; i.e., "all that glitters is not gold."

*Regarding the political violence I'm facing because of Joe Biden, Obama, the Clintons, and all elected politicians since the beginning of the United States unto the present. To this, America is a settler-colony police state that persecutes trans people, a priori. Regarding Watson, then, try to remember a few basic things (re: from "Raising Awareness" but modified and applied to Watson, not Bad Empanada):

• What I say about [her] is true regardless if I have clothes on or not, how much money I make, sex I have [...], grass I touch, work I do, or gender I identify as [... In short, regardless of how polite Watson thinks I am or, more to the point, should be.]
• 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).

Lack of accountability isn't a virtue, Watson. This includes your telling of a trans women, in so many words, to "know her place." When I was polite, you held your tongue; this time, you took the bait—YouTube effectively the Wild West, as far as that goes ("all's fair in love and war"). Unfortunately for you, I'm an authority on this topic (rape prevention my life's work), and you/your response the subject of today's lesson. Next time, think before you speak (said video meriting my response to begin with, remember)! Practice what you preach!

(source: Neal Simpson's "Blogger looks to take her war on pseudoscience to the airwaves," 2007)

Hubris: Watson's Achilles Heel

Before we conclude, Watson's mistake isn't her valid investigative work dating back decades (above); e.g., on the Epstein Files; Guns, Germs and Steel; James Somerton, transphobes, Dave Grohl, Pat Robertson, and Dawkins' many flaws (e.g., his sexism, racism through eugenics, and evangelicalism), etc. Instead, it's her TERF-style hubris, meaning her obtuse response to criticism and short-sighted myopia that progressives (white or not, male or not) historically suffer from; i.e., state apologia dressed up as "reason" and "critical thought," while gaslighting oppressed groups bearing said criticism out; re: I'm a trans-woman academic, rape victim* and expert in critiquing moderacy and tokenism† concerning rape. Telling such a person to "tone it down" is like saying "smile more"; you can do it, but it's seldom a good idea!

*Re: refer to "I'm a Rape Survivor" from "Raising Awareness" for an extended look at my survivor's testimony.

†As I write in "Raising Awareness":

(artists: Persephone van der Waard and Cuwu) 

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, enacts as much as token trans people like Natalie Wynn or Abigail Thorn do, or 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") 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")
    • 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.

Yet, caught in the four-eyed gaze of a cis white woman with Nancy Drew Syndrome, I'm suddenly (at least in Watson's eyes) entirely incapable of critical thought. It's infantilizing—indicative of the very treatment that trans women (and their so-called "temerity") receive from know-it-all dickheads (male or not), but also cis women under scientist men; re (from the Demon Module):

(source: Maia Weinstock's "Margaret Hamilton's Apollo Code," 2016)

In canonical circles, such things are often buried, then trotted out like show ponies/witches for state aims fetishizing and demonizing female scientists (a STEM tradition that extends to anything monstrous-feminine, not just white cis women, but one begot out of nuns and female detectives). So was Shelley—in writing the first science fiction novel—breaking new ground her usual jailors would immediately try to reign in (source: "Making Demons")

What's a girl to do? I know! Instead of playing the cop looking for recognition while delegitimizing naysayers, maybe you actually try to see past the anger of someone criticizing you? That you actually try to understand why trans people "like us" are angry in our criticism of people like yourself (read: cis women)? It's not hard, provided you learn to swallow your pride and challenge fascism-as-endemic to Pax Americana.

In Conclusion

To conclude, while white male nerds certainly suck (re: Solomon Nelson, above), it is possible to sell out (thus apologize for rape) despite being a woman; i.e., in ways our abjection symposium and essay body have explored to a limited degree. So far your actions haven't suggested otherwise, Watson; i.e., if a trans woman critiques you angrily and your first reaction is to punch down at her in the most petty way possible—effectively reducing her to "a person" who needs to apologize and kiss the ground you walk on—then news flash: you aren't as progressive as you market yourself as. Furthermore, anger and criticism aren't mutually exclusive (nor is sex work), and anyone who says or acts otherwise (read: you) is stuck in older, harmful modes of thought; i.e., from the Enlightenment onwards—with Cartesian cops historically calling their critics "hysterical," ergo unable to think and needing others to think (and speak) "for us"; re: Descartes' laws of ecology pimping care work into the present space and time. Scientists aren't automatically heroes—quite the opposite, in fact! This goes for any gender under the sun.

In short, you're a scientist, Nancy Drew, and your bigoted actions (read: civility politics) would seem to indicate your own privileged status in the STEM fields (a place known for its own rape apologia; re: Dawkins and deGrasse Tyson); i.e., as somehow trumping a care worker, activist, and educated whore, like myself. I beg to differ. Again, "Worker exploitation is bound together with the appropriation of extrahuman nature and the unpaid work of care" (source: Seven Cheap Things); i.e., under the very Cartesian bias you engender and embody—meaning through your behaviors defending the state (and its rape) while tone-policing my gay ass as "hysterical." Rape is everywhere, in the Gothic; so is rape apologia upholding state power, from Radcliffe to Rowling to Rebecca Watson. Again, that's what Nancy Drew Syndrome ultimately is—there being no better candidate to receive it than yourself.

For me, "Joy Under Fascism" includes punching TERFs defending the state. Was I rude? Sure, guilty as charged! Was I "irrational"? Eh, if you say so. Was I wrong? Uh, about what—how white progressives like you are moderately bigoted while apologizing for rape, TERF-style? I think your actions speak for themselves, comrade. At the very least, if a fellow activist/woman (and trans academic, in my case) tells you you're being transphobic/sketch about rapist men you're defending from criticism, perhaps you should ask why instead of merely throwing the baby out with the bathwater (re: furthering abjection by treating me as irrational/abject, above)?

Footnotes

[2] Cops are traitors, recruited from oppressed groups by state powers; women are arguably the oldest oppressed group, selected to be cops in Amazonian schemes dating back millennia (the poetic merger of sex and force). To that, a cop often disguises "undercover"; i.e., as a false rebel, with white women classically tokenizing as "Amazons" but appearing as everything from ordinary sleuths, housewives and suburbanites to those things transplanted in a given "wilderness" being colonized. Such things operate historically on a spectrum—starting with "those meddling kids" from Scooby Doo (and older Neo-Gothic novels) on one end, and the "white Indian" trope from "leather-stocking tales" like The Last of the Mohicans (1826) on the other (re: "The Roots of Trauma," 2024). A form of Amazonomachia (therefore token assimilation fantasies "slumming" false rebellion to uphold Capitalist Realism), the white Indian appears in markedly neoliberal examples like Samus Aran from Metroid (1986)—essentially the Final Girl trope in different slasher movies (and older media forms) becoming the token slasher cop to resolve state disputes (and which Samus took from Alien's [1979] Ripley out of older Amazonian tropes revived as "femme forte/fatale," in Neo-Gothic fiction onwards; re: "In Search of the Secret Spell," 2024).

To it, the Gothic heroine is a damsel-in-distress who doubles, later on, as the aforementioned cop-in-disguise—one whose white, female, middle-class character (the subjugated Amazon) acts oppressed with some truth; i.e., to maintain nuclear models extending in and out of real life, typically by dressing fascism up as "anti-fascism" (see: notes on Zinn and Parenti, deeper in): the warrior princess with a secret identity* that ultimately serves the state and its built-in contradictions, mid-abjection (re: the pimp's revenge versus the whore, the cop taking revenge on nature-as-whore by constantly generating a verminized criminal to exterminate; see: "Rape Reprise," 2024).

*I.e., to blend in with and fight "crime" as a naturalized status: under imperial models, mid-decay of an "Indigenous" sort; i.e., while ranking imposturously among them, the aforementioned gradient ranging from Princess Lea and Xena to Ripley and Imperator Furiosa, and having the potential to parrot or play rebellion out "for real" (matter shapes conscious, the Superstructure shaping rebellion in duality). As usual, the function of such beings determines through where they ultimately send power (to explore this idea further than we have here, refer to my extensive research on Amazons/the monstrous-feminine).

DARVO and obscurantism are tried-and-true state tools; i.e., one used by the elite, but especially their chameleon, copy-cat proponents blaming the victim while copying them (the Gothic fascination had with alien impostors/their invasions felt at home, but also government overreach committed by ruinous, neo-feudal enterprise: behind the Black Veil's "fog of war" in various homely/unhomely spheres—what I, again, call "the liminal hauntology of war' or traveling castle. While Cameron's Ripley was a CIA stand-in—specifically a neo-con "advisor" killing Reds dressed up as bugs on the frontiers (re: "Giger's Xenomorph" 2025)—Nancy from Stranger Things (2017) becomes more and and more militant/cop-like, over time; i.e., behind a "radical" façade closer to home (echoes of Red Dawn [1984] and its own juvenile rebel fantasy policing the colony). To it, her own cop-like violence (and its monopoly through settler-colonial models with a Zionist character among its cast; e.g., Noah Schnapp) only escalates at home, as time goes on; i.e., a "female Rambo" versus state-appointed bugbears (scapegoats), her false-flag double function (the cryptonymy of cop and victim) reminding me of Jane Fonda's anti-war appearance: undermined by staunchly Zionist action (thus function) versus Venessa Redgrave in the 1970s and '80s (GDF's "Israel in Movies," 2025). What's more, the entire thing echoes cryptomimetically with Andor's (2022) Mon Martha, standing up to Emperor Palpatine and his thugs (with Deedra Meero—played wonderfully by Irish actress and outspoken Palestine supporter, Denise Gough (e.g., BreakThrough News)—being the closest that show has to a Fonda-style traitor). Such things ultimately work in duality; i.e., liberation and exploitation paradoxically share the same stages, actors good and bad wearing the same costumes and masks to enforce or subvert the "natural order": while speaking to/with dominance and submission through poetic preference and shorthand (a kind of code playing power out, on and offstage; re: "Notes on Power").

[3] Neptune being the Roman name for Poseidon, Medusa cursed/guarded by Athena for being raped in her temple while asleep. Over time, the Gorgon myth would evolve; re: (from "Always a Victim"):

As we've said, the Medusa legend itself is quite old, stemming from the Ancient Greeks to the Romans inheriting their stories, and for which Medusa herself underwent a long transformation from weapon to monster to human-appearing monster woman talking about rape. As Elizabeth Hadley writes in "More than a Monster: Medusa Misunderstood" (2024):

(artist: Sam Milnes)

You might know her from Caravaggio's famous Medusa, the face of Versace, the book, Percy Jackson and the Olympians, or some other adaptation of the ancient myth. Medusa is ubiquitous, appearing in Greek and Roman literature (from Hesiod's Theogony to Ovid's Metamorphoses) and in architecture, metalwork, vases, sculptures, and paintings throughout history. Yet the most well-known portrayals of her all predictably converge upon one brief moment from her life's story: her beheading and the use of her decapitated head by a man to petrify others. Medusa then becomes an apotropaic symbol warding off evil, similar to the evil eye. She is imagined more often as an object or a monster than as a human. Even though Classical and Hellenistic depictions presented Medusa as more human than in the previous Archaic period, the popular conception of Medusa today still upholds her "otherness," her monstrosity. Modern-day artists have embraced Medusa as an emblem of female power, a beautiful monster, and used her story in the service of social movements; for example, Luciano Garbati's Medusa with the Head of Perseus went viral in 2020 in connection with the #MeToo movement (source).

In turn, Hadley highlights the evolution of Medusa in three distinct cases:

CASE 1: MEDUSA AS YOU KNOW: Medusa's more typical depictions feature her on a shield or as a decapitated head with snakes for hair.  This first case highlights the Medusa you most likely know and learned in school or from a mythology book: Medusa as a monster, an object, a weapon. A head, a symbol, never a woman. Terrifying, never beautiful.

CASE 2: THE TRANSITION OF MEDUSA: This case highlights the spectrum of Medusas, starting with the Greek version of the myth in which she is nothing more than a monster and moving towards a more human and feminine portrayal. These works of art highlight the nuance that is buried in Medusa's myth, and the numerous ways in which artists have chosen to render Medusa.

CASE 3: MEDUSA AND RAPE: MORE WOMAN THAN MONSTER: Most audiences today who are familiar with the traditional character of Medusa don't know anything at all about her past or have misconceptions of the origins of her curse. In Ovid's Metamorphoses, the reason Medusa is metamorphosized into a Gorgon is because Neptune rapes her in Athena's temple. Instead of blaming Neptune, Athena punishes the beautiful Medusa for the violation of her temple, and curses her by transforming her from a maiden into a monster. Although Ovid is the first author to truly humanize Medusa by telling this story, he only does so within the context of the myth of Perseus and Andromeda. In that tale, Ovid emphasizes Perseus as the heroic male protagonist who retells Medusa's origin story after he's used her severed head as a weapon to save the endangered Andromeda.

Only one book in all of Rauner's many editions of Ovid's Metamorphoses contains the actual scene of Neptune raping Medusa, a microcosm for the reception of her story in art and literature. Whereas acts of rape in many other Greek myths are well-known and central to an understanding of their narratives, Medusa's is historically hidden and underrepresented. Instead, she is known for her beheading by heroic Perseus and for the people and monsters she petrifies both before and after her death. She is known for the terror she elicits and not her beauty or womanhood. As the books in this case demonstrate, even when Medusa's rape is illustrated, it is minimized, especially when compared to other representations of rape from Ovid's Metamorphoses, particularly at the level of body language (ibid.).

While Creed would discuss the monstrous-feminine as something that refuses to be a victim, I would extend "her terrifying powers"; i.e., in fully inclusive ways to avoid the kinds of tokenism that non-intersectional feminism historically falls prey to (triangulation); re: "I am, however, a trans woman who has gone above and beyond women like Barbara Creed, Angela Carter, Luce Irigaray and Laura Ng, etc, in my pioneering of ludo-Gothic BDSM" (source: "In Search of the Secret Spell").

[4] Or blood moons; i.e., anything suitably big and scary but also inescapable; e.g., the Moon from Majora's Mask (2000) crashing face-first into Termina, or something that feels equivalent to that, mid-gaslight; re (from the Undead Module's "Escaping Jadis, or Running Up that Hill"):

(exhibit 39a1b: Fatal portrait, top-left: Jadis, whose "beautiful" memory I will replace with the truth of what they were—an abused person who went on to abuse others; artist, top-right: Persephone van der Waard [...]

A common Gothic trope, then, is the restoration of sentiment through the material world: the collapse of the Gothic castle like a nightmare, the transgenerational curse of its perceived, mighty undeath swept away like a bad dream and repealed with a benign counterpart [...] these stories more broadly denote a continuous healing process—of oneself and the sick home (or land around it) as part of the socio-material world that occurs through the pain of existence unnaturally affecting a natural process: the fusion of memories, artistic ideas and trauma together in nightmarishly beautiful ways. As such, I had intimately studied them already in my own graduate work, writing about Hollow Knight's poisoned land, but also poisoned memories per the rememory process; in turn, my postgraduate work involved my surviving of rape as something to study and camp more than once.

Pregnant with these sensations under Jadis' "care," I dutifully wrote the story down after they threw me out (Persephone van der Waard's "Setting the Record Straight; My Ex's Abuse of Me: February 17th, 2022"). I did so at the time in order to get it straight in my own head, but also communicate my exodus in language I thought others would understand (rape is alien to many people, but Gothic stories less so); then, after Florida, I drew Jadis despite knowing the image would chill my blood at every viewing.

But as terrifying as this was, it became something to poetically-medicinally revive when reversing abjection; re (from the Undead Module's "Seeing Dead People," 2024):

(exhibit 43d: Models and artist: Jadis and Persephone van der Waard. Jadis and I, re-envisioned as a knight and her femboy ward through their encouragement/coercion [they would pull my funding and threaten me when angered, becoming a cycle of reactive abuse]. Doing so has transformed the past in ways that reflect on my abuse while also offering up a better hypothetical in the same Gothic language: what could have been and what could actually be in future love stories should workers [and BDSM contracts] actually be respected, post-negotiation—not a memory of the past, but a rememory focused on remembering the essence of what was lost and, if not forgetting the horrifying abuse suffered at the same time, then at least not letting it rule me; i.e., me feeding on something I could rearrange and draw strength from—to not have it drain me all the time. Trauma is cryptomimetically echoed; i.e., in ways that acknowledge what was while subverting it per a revolutionary cryptonymy!

It's not exactly "the happy ending" of the Neo-Gothic novel, if purely because it doesn't do away with the haunted past; but it does present a suitable "What if?" for future undertakings that bear some resemblance to a former life while being different in all the ways that matter. This "ghost" of Jadis represents them at their very best, their most beautiful. On this page and nowhere else, they are still my protector and beloved...)

[5] One of my neologisms:

the liminal hauntology of war (danger disco)

Another term of mine, one describing a half-real poetic space to heroically move through, onstage and off, and one that concerns the hauntological presence and function of a Gothic chronotope (the castle or some other war-like alien double of the nuclear home); i.e., of the Imperial Boomerang bringing monsters (and their masters) home to roost, during fascism; e.g., Tolkien and Cameron's refrain (further academic coinage on my part, specifically that of the High Fantasy treasure map and Metroidvania/shooter), per the monomyth and Promethean Quest (for power) chasing the Numinous: for different reasons during the dialectic of the alien. In turn, these translate in and out of neoliberal stories (especially videogames) into real life; i.e., during the abjection process as something to reify and further for profit raping nature as monstrous-feminine (re: "A Note About Canonical Essentialism"). Also something I call the "danger disco," or source of Numinous thrills; i.e., where the hero chases the Numinous during calculated risk: to articulate and interpret generational trauma under state confusion and duress.

This hauntology assumes cloistered, faux-churchly qualities infused with "barbarian" elements; i.e., a fear of the past's imaginary return under Capitalist Realism, which sex work fucks with to reverse abjection; re (from "It Began with a Whisper," 2025):

(artist, right: Frank Frazetta; source: left)

Gothic concerns the return of the past as whorelike; re (from my Metroidvania corpus): one that involves

the exploration of tremendous obscurity, power and decay from a disadvantaged (and erotic) social-sexual position when a prophesized bastard or whore comes home to roost; i.e., the return of a tyrant or profligate, whose fatal homecoming emerges from a half-formed rogue barbarity/derelict, imaginary past, again usually a castle [but specifically the black castle/whorehouse/den of thieves]. While said castle's morphology is architectural, its operatic hauntology and cryptonymy each bear an oddly whorish stamp while furthering or reversing abjection; i.e., seeking revelation and revenge, mise-en-abyme (source).

While capital conceals its own liminal hauntologies' endless returns (the state rapes by design), they can be revealed through holistic study as returning to old objects (and means) of study. In turn, liberation happens inside the prison as coming home to roost, a dark inheritance we take and liberate ourselves with; i.e., versus the pimp defending their "inheritance," a lie told to the middle class by the elite so they'll continue the structure of profit as usual: through inheritance anxiety yielding toxic bloodlines; e.g., the Belmonts (and similar fallen houses, like the Jedi from Star Wars) proving themselves to state masters, force-of-will, by recursively punching whores when Imperialism comes home to empire (see: "Back to Necropolis" and black Nazis in Castlevania: Nocturne, 2023); re (from "Prey as Liberators"):

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).

From barrow downs to Gothic castles to liminal, danger-disco spaces in general, such opera house, dream-like spaces of relegation, of shame and sin—hence wet dreams and nightmares (nocturnal emissions including blood, but also wasted semen)—speak to unspeakable things nonetheless tied to industry as a banal evil; i.e., one pimping whores of all different kinds: the slaughterhouse, gladiatorial circuit/duelist arena, toilet, carnival (circus, casino, fairgrounds, amusement park, grand guignol, etc), plantation, jail, torture chamber and panopticon, beauty pageant, etc, as one-and-all shackled to the rise of the owner class, the bourgeoisie, through state-corporate mergers dating back centuries. The whore sits inside all of these, something to root out/vengefully perceive through ergodic (non-linear) motion and non-singular interpretation, mid-liminal expression; re: sex, drugs and rock 'n roll being as much an instruction (and rhythm) as anything to appropriate by state forces. "Yeah, baby! There you go! Fuck momma just like that!" Unmoored from pimps, these whorish echoes of incest, rape and unequal power at large can occur without actual abuse, but generally riff off canonical forms; e.g., Dracula's problematic love and brides, "the love that dare not speak its name" predating Jewish blood libel but having since married to it on a variety of arbitrary (flexible) persecution languages the state simultaneously pimps out (doubling us).

Like Gozer the Traveler's dreaded portal, calculated risk opens the doors of abjection, but also anisotropically reverses the Black Veil's flow of power (terrorist/counterterrorist; re: Robert Asprey); i.e., "choosing the form of the Destructor" by humanizing the whore in reverse-abject dialogs. We have to cross the streams, and that means treating sex work as work. It's the oldest form of work there is, something always in demand. Canon needs whores to further itself and its revenge; whores, to speak to the state abusing us, therefore transform it into something better! Said revenge includes speaking out, mid-cryptonymy! We're not just whores, then, but polyamorous, oft-plural survivors of unspeakable trauma; re: the ghost of the counterfeit reversing or furthering abjection, mid-opposition/on the Aegis!

(source: "Cornholing the Corn Lady"; exhibit 19c: model and artist: Cara Day and Persephone van der Waard)

In short, whores reverse abjection by fucking to/with metal; i.e., as demons do, cultivating forbidden sight through forbidden things (sex or otherwise, below): with asses like onions!

(artist: Cheekie)

[6] Ludo-Gothic BDSM learned from earlier "prototypes" facing similar issues; re (from Volume One's "Prey as Liberators," 2024):

settler colonialism unfolds due to the colonizer's fragile disposition towards what he's been conditioned to fear and dominate through war and rape culture as integral to Capitalism. [...] This complex heritage is vital to consider in relation to ourselves, whose own compelled divisions and alienation demand we consider Walpole and those he inspired with his castles as hopelessly divided on various societal issues; i.e., according to sex and gender as it existed back then informing our own liberation. [...] I'd like to spend a few pages unpacking the genderqueer history of male Gothic authors before considering it in relation to our own interrogations of the Gothic mode; i.e., reclaiming it for our purposes, using atypical bodies, shapes and colors to express ourselves as we are born into our collective struggles under capital.

First, these reclamations occur despite our "inherited confusions" begot from "a sinister corner of the Western imagination." Described as such by Chris Baldrick, his introduction to the 2009 Oxford Book of Gothic Tales writes of the Gothic period being cited as a time of darkness and unproductive history following the collapse of Rome, but also something decided by the elite in opposition to those they sought to dominate centuries later through settler-colonial xenophobia:

In its earliest sense, the word is simply the adjective denoting the language and ethnic identity of the Goths; […] Long after they disappeared into the ethnic melting-pots of the Mediterranean, their fearful name was taken and used to prop up one side of that set of cultural oppositions by which the Renaissance and its heirs defined and claimed possession of European civilization: Northern versus Southern, [Dark] Ages versus the Age of Enlightenment, medieval versus modern, barbarity versus civility, superstition versus Reason. […] Accordingly, by the late eighteenth century "Gothic" was commonly used to mean "medieval, therefore barbarous," in a largely unquestioned equation of civilization with classical standards (source).

While Baldrick also argues how the likes of Walpole use this dichotomy to both erode the presumed "superiority" of classical culture and to fear the medieval world as a dark and brutal place amid this ghost of the counterfeit, I posit that Baldrick is astoundingly incorrect in assuming that

Unlike "Romantic," then, "Gothic" in its literary usage never becomes a positive term of cultural revaluation, but carries with it […] an identification of the medieval with the barbaric. A Gothic novel or tale will almost certainly offend classical tastes and rational principles, but it will not do so by urging any positive view of the Middle Ages (ibid.).

Yet, this incorrectness stems from the invented, imaginary past as "medieval" in ways that potentially rewrite the conventional wisdoms regarding said past… which Baldrick conveniently ignores. [...]

(source)

This brings us to Horace Walpole, the writer of the first Gothic novel and an ostensibly homosexual (or ace) man who devoted most of his relatively long life to making Gothic not just a label to describe the medieval period, but literally a specific style of campy fakery aiming at the Numinous used to embellish the present space and time through intentionally ahistorical reinvention [e.g., Strawberry Hill House, above]: the castle where such oddities could be found and observed, which is a birthplace for ludo-Gothic BDSM as I would eventually envision it; re: through a palliative Numinous tied to castles in the flesh and a queer-coded "medieval."