Essay: Whores, Heart Attacks, and Those Who Cause Them; or, Reversing Abjection to Find Joy Under Fascism
This essay, "Joy Under Fascism," was written to find joy under fascism; i.e., while responding to a scholar whose book I found in a used book shop after a health scare: Jill Suzanne Smith’s Berlin Coquette (2013), on sex work. Also applies to Amazons and my Metroidvania work. It remains part of my Sex Positivity series, albeit coming from outside the books, themselves; i.e., belonging to a disparate body of essays and interviews that fall under the same basic umbrella, but often will engage with more than the usual suspects: someone who vocally disagrees with us in times of state, even planetary crisis, and with whom various members of the Sex Positivity project make themselves heard.
Note: This essay is actually part of my 2025 Metroidvania Corpus—specifically thinking about whores and violence and their depiction in and out of media; e.g., my acquisition of old books at used bookstores, and synthesizing them years later in light of crisis, health scares, and fresh love. Said essay is written to be as SFW as possible, but where this blog and the YouTube version will be more censored than on my 18+ website.
For the Visually Impaired: I will also be reading the SFW version aloud on my YouTube channel.
Disclaimer Regarding Essay Contents: This essay is non-profit and provided for purposes of education, critique, and satire; i.e., as a matter of professional opinion against multiple other public figures and publicly available material during times of state crisis.
CW: classism, racism, rape, transphobia, whorephobia, fascism, aporophobia, police brutality and genocide
Amazon Postscript/Mini-Essay for Funsies: Whores, Heart Attacks, and Those Who Cause Them; or, Reversing Abjection to Find Joy Under Fascism (feat. CScottyW, Jill Suzanne Smith, and more)
For the past week, I found myself undergoing a health scare, specifically one surrounding my heart. The events that followed led me to writing this essay. Given its topic, I chose to include it in my corpus—a brief glimpse into the critical engagement side of things; i.e., which my corpus largely avoids for brevity's sake, but whose mentioning here feels increasingly important to me in light of recent political change; re: fascism, but also my unyielding resolution to combat fascism day and night—through joyful, slutty and ravenously hungry monstrous-feminine nudity (GNC self-expression laid bare, alongside other marginalities). Death comes for us all, is always just around the corner but especially while capital accelerates the process for profit, mid-abjection. Consider me recharged at learning that I won't be dropping dead this instant, but also knowing I can have my revenge against capital a bit longer! However bonkers that may be (silly-serious, as the Gothic generally is), know the attempt was at least genuine: a field guide for surviving fascism as historically die-hard.
—Perse, 7/10/2025
(artist: Persephone van der Waard)
P.S., In the Gothic tradition of found documents, especially derelict documents (open secrets), this essay focuses on a 2013 book I found in a used book shop by accident: Berlin Coquette (2013) by Jill Suzanne Smith. And perhaps Smith went on to write really cool stuff; i.e., that's more gender-inclusive than her 2013 book, but specifically its introduction. In that vein, I'm essentially arguing with her "ghost" (a sensation not entirely unheard of, in academia; e.g., Weber versus Marx), but also a fragment of said ghost. My selective reading (an academic standby when time is short) should highlight her book's flaws, insofar as her introduction sums up her book. To it, my problem with Smith lies in her premise furthering abjection, not individual problems sprinkled throughout.
P.P.S., This particular essay contains censored nudity whose context remains erotic; [...] i.e., of workers having sex or otherwise doing sex work for educational purposes. Depending on the platform, this nudity will be more censored or less.
Jouissance can be described as "joy" with an intellectual but also orgasmic heft. Being a trans sex worker academic, I experience joy while fighting fascism; i.e., by reversing Kristeva's process of abjection (us versus them, generally in monstrous "Gothic" language, mid-cryptonymy—itself a term lifted from Hogle's "The Restless Labyrinth: Cryptonomy in the Gothic Novel," 1980). But it's not always healthy. Revolution demands sacrifice, curing poison with "poison," rape with "rape" on a historical-material scale using dialectical-material arguments: the dualistic, half-real poetry of monstrous theatre for "ass war" (class war via sex work—with cultural and racial considerations raising intelligence and awareness to prevent rape, thus genocide on a systemic level; re: ludo-Gothic BDSM targeting a bourgeois Superstructure for proletarian purposes). This essay will explore doing potentially unhealthy things to combat absolutely unhealthy things, the joy under fascism being paradoxical nudity to reverse abjection before the killing fully starts; i.e., using the very monstrous language known to whores that some academics tacitly reject; e.g., Jill Suzanne Smith, the foil for this current adventure as I give capital a heart attack: by unmasking the whore before it's too late—not to punish her by outing her to police forces, Radcliffe-style, but wake Medusa up to punch up collectively at capital pimping workers and nature as monstrous-feminine (to cheapen them, but also their exploitation; re: Patel and Moore). Sleep is the cousin of death, and death and love only enmesh further when the wolf is loose!
(artist, left: Jill Suzanne Smith; right: Persephone van der Waard)
Some Context
Let it never be said that fascism is good for you; nor is fighting it a wholly salubrious ordeal. On the Fourth of July weekend, I suddenly fell ill (mild, spontaneous tachycardia). Concerned, I chose not to suffer in silence, but reach out to a local partner for help. Part of that was logistics, but also a holiday from the stress of work that was making me sick. In short, they helped me, Ms. Workaholic, take an impromptu "vacation" ("Stress is cardiotoxic!" they said, to which my inner Gothicist readily concurred; e.g., thinking of the plot to Les Diaboliques, 1955—but also Doctor Zhivago [1965, left] depicting love and death as "kissing cousins"). During my break, we went to a used bookstore (my partner's idea). There, I found several books that caught my eye, leading me to write this essay.
For you youngsters who have never been to an actual bookstore (used or otherwise), the process is rather stochastic—the serendipitous delight one feels when finding a good book essentially involving whatever catches one's eye. This ocular process of selection has served me well—in the past when picking out books with different partners (see: exhibit 1, below), or picking out partners who, once chosen, might lead to various adventures that include books, sex, books about sex, monsters, and so on. A good partner and a good book often go hand-in-hand, and monsters are often sexual in nature (or discuss things that are, mid-abjection; e.g., Communism, the Devil, and sex workers being "regular suspects" under Capitalism):
(exhibit 1: Two different used bookstores, two different partners who bought me books after grad school—with various adventures tied to each; e.g., the Styrofoam containers in the take-out bag [from the second book store, bottom-right] accidentally overturned, spilling their contents into the bag and causing it to leak [and forcing me to throw out the food, much to my chagrin]. Deprived of prandial food thanks to my own absent-mindedness, I fed my mind on the usual "foodstuffs" academics often resort to—a house of leaves! Furthermore, when writing this section, I took my copy of George Mosse's Nationalism and Sexuality [1985] that Jadis bought me, in 2022 [the rightmost book, bottom-left], and combined it alongside my examining of a different book; re: Jill Smith's Berlin Coquette that a newer partner purchased for me, in a completely different city and state, three years later.)
The exact books (and their respective acquisitions) led me to reading a bit while at the hospital, and gave me food for thought about my own work in relation to other workers; e.g., Smith's Berlin Coquette as something to synthesize; i.e., in the aforementioned old-fashioned way of looking at something and going from there; re: from grad school onwards, leasing the approach from my pre-Internet past: as a little girl reading books from the local library in my spare time. Books are brainfood; I see food, I eat it—with people being "food" as much as books (as are all the assorted neo-medieval hyphenations "Gothic" typically affords).
This time, I read Smith's concept of a "whore's ball"; i.e., as advertised by West Berlin media, in 1988, but also her academic desire to view whores in ways that defy common expectations about whores:
"What will the world come to, if we can no longer tell who's a whore and who isn't?' [re: the abjection process].
This book is much like the whore's ball, for it provides its readers with images of prostitutes in Berlin that defy common stereotypes about deviance and destitution. It does so, however, by examining debates on prostitution that took place up to a century before the women of Hydra organized their first ball. […] Some artists and writers who lived and worked in the German capital at the time were able to see beyond dichotomized images of prostitutes and envision them as something other than victims or villains [emphasis, me]. Granted, some of Berlin's most iconic cultural texts serve up visions of female monstrosity and victimization that are impossible to erase from our index […] Without ignoring those images [of Berlin's metropolitan decadence and sexual murder], this book shows that the idea of prostitutes as rational workers and as elegant bourgeois "cocottes" (Kokotten) also surfaced and took hold during this period and give us a far more complex, differentiated picture of gender and sexuality in modern Berlin [emphasis, me]. My work disrupts the dichotomized reading of prostitutes as either victims or agents of destruction reproduced in existing scholarship [re: Creed's The Monstrous-Feminine, 1993], which, much like the taz's article about the Whore's Ball, perpetuates stereotypes of prostitutes and produces narratives laden with judgement that do an injustice to the very context they are describing. Analyses that view prostitution only through the restrictive dual lens of destitution and sexual deviance lead to less nuanced readings of primary sources [emphasis, me] (source: "Introduction" to Berlin Coquette).
And yet in reading it, I suddenly felt personally attacked; i.e., by a fellow academic woman discounting my profession and research areas; re: not just Metroidvania, but the Gothic, monstrous-feminine, ludo-Gothic BDSM and public nudism (exhibiting sex and force)! An explanation eluded me, save that I wanted to lash out at this stuffy German prude: "Bitch, please."
(artist: Caravaggio)
In hindsight, I will now follow up with (to Smith and her argument, in particular):
There's nothing "simple" about the virgin/whore stereotypes you reject as "vulgar." As far as worker emancipation goes, taboos yield far more power than you acknowledge, and which playing with them unlocks. By refusing to, you show your privilege and your ass, your argument's stunning ignorance whitewashing prostitution by discarding Medusa's ancient paradoxical utility (re, Creed: "her terrifying powers") for the worse. Consider my rebuke, however bombastic and biased it may be, a gorgon's imprimatur—a smaller vessel for gargantuan force! By discounting the victims/villains binary known to whores, you also reject the cops-and-victims reality that whores endlessly suffer under capital. Imagine a coder who refuses to code-switch and we have the right idea. We can't critique capital without these codes, so shutting them down is a mistake. Can our enemies fetishize them to serve profit? Sure, but that blade cuts both ways, affording the whore her usual duality and paradox; i.e., which workers can reclaim in ways your "bourgeois cocottes" demonstrably could not. Hot take: they abandoned their ancient power for petty concessions that cost them dearly (and will cost you dearly as fascism comes home anew).
I digress. Reading Smith's words, I found myself (a trans Gothic whore, kinkster and academic) incredibly ambivalent—so much so that the prior engagement compelled me to write what follows (academics live to piss each other off, much of what we produce bourne out of fierce disagreement): to unpack Smith's needlessly complicated, see-saw nuance (and at times negligent) message in ways I didn't want to wholly dismiss. It was dubious on its face, but still had a few nuggets of truth worth exploring (which we'll get to).
All the same, to reject the dichotomy Smith describes is to omit the alien entirely versus embracing it to reverse abjection (mating porcupines). Smith's argument avoids reversal thus furthers abjection, ipso facto; i.e., she falls silent to a moderate degree (regardless of what she says) and silence is genocide, which I want to critique here: by taking her to task while finding joy under fascism—as a shared goal from convergent, at-times diverging perspectives concerning whores (and Metroidvania, in my case). It requires universal liberation through intersectional solidarity and that is certainly nothing new! Whores are the Medusa, and they must scream, one and all, through the power of nude uproar versus state crimes (ergo profit):
(artist: Théodore Géricault)
We'll revisit Smith, in a moment—save to say here that she effectively blames not just the Gothic and non-female/non-white whores but also naked whores; i.e., as "irrational" versus clothed, thinking and paid (whitewashing "Berlin" in the process). I would respond that whores (and any viewing them through a monstrous-feminine emphasis) don't spread stereotypes about prostitution so much as deliberately reuse stereotypical, virgin/whore language common to sex workers; i.e., in ways state powers rely on through archetypes abused and/or overlooked: by "choosy" activism and scholarship afraid of gender trouble, but also monsters and naked bodies home to stereotypes enforced by capital. Ignorance is a luxury.
Furthermore, whores are monsters, which we shouldn't erase by saying that playing with them is somehow "reducing women" (or those treated like women) to capital's usual punching bags (so-called theatre phobias rejecting satirical value for abstinence); those who police clothes further abjection, promoting genocide and sexual harm no matter how clothed someone is. Just ask the Weimar women after 1933! Capital chattelizes workers differently but most of them died, anyways. We must fuck with stereotypes to combat their canonically taboo nature; e.g., whores are bastions of distress that make men "weak," stray and so on (re: Original Sin).
The problem is, Smith's moderate "whore tokenism" includes rejecting said stereotypes to a manner of segregative degree, versus embracing and reclaiming them—with Smith essentially saying to her readers, "We're not like those whores over there; we're fancy whores that don't look 'like a whore'"; re: their troubling emphasis on "bourgeois" as a) anything positive, and b) a misunderstanding of "bourgeois" by treating it as "middle-class" instead of "owner class" (from Marx). It feels oddly reductive and assimilative—an effect easily imitated on various registers; e.g., with videogames and performance art, next page, as having its own neoliberal class character that echoes Smith's subtle castration; i.e., of rebellion through performative assimilation flirting with capital (thus fascism): the "bougie," classy kind of slut, which despite its evolution from Marie Antionette to Paris Hilton (all workers are sexualized, even when not technically whores), feels profoundly inadequate and, among other things, aporophobic—a castration of radical sentiment through "made it" vibes: workers, thus whores, no longer.
Sex work is work, paid or not, clothed or not, survival or not. Telling whores to "cover up" is the oldest refrain there is, one survival sex work bears the brunt of. All the while, research is a highly selective act, one where Smith chooses a very particular kind of whore to write about (and gushing about them while she does, in her acknowledgements): white, urbane, female and gentrified, but also dressed, European, Germanic and paid. Per capital, gentrification always follows with immediate, ruthless decay—killing respectability to rape the wife/whore, clothes or not. Segregation is no defense, all workers victims to different degrees where the outcome is always ruin.
(exhibit 2: Source: Steven Chavez' "The first Street Fighter 6 Manon cosplay we've ever seen is absolutely beautiful, receives attention from the game's director," 2022; artist: Kitty Kaboom.)
Nonetheless, whores remain cryptomimetic in their usage (e.g., books are copies, and whores copy each other), one whose dualistic exploitation and liberation occupy the same stages; i.e., operating in ways that sexual activism can subvert against the usual pimpings. Gothic Communism relies on action for universal liberation, using whatever my friends and I can to separately and together accomplish that aim: in any Omelas, not just Berlin (the Omelas paradox being how workers can only transform a given place while inside it); e.g., Metroidvania a half-real "Berlin," "Athens" or "Rome"; i.e., assaulted dualistically by barbarians playing at false rebels (fascism) and actual rebels taking said barbarity back (Communism): on the half-real stages of play where arguments are had. Workers can say one thing and do another—with whores having historically supported vertical power structures by punching down as well as horizontal ones by punching up. Regardless, we can't rely on academics in their castles to spread the word; we must become fluent in such matters before spreading them in ways useful to our goals—a squadron of stochastic counterterror anisotropically reversing abjection in terror language whores excel at (and the kind Smith deliberately abjures, if only to a degree).
Keeping that in mind, Smith comes across a bit "stuffy" and classist, in my opinion, but also achingly nostalgic for a "before time." Stuck in a frozen past versus a plastic one, she fleeces herself while covering up; i.e., by conveying a "pick me" mentality despite various concessions I more or less agree with; e.g., "There is no doubt that prostitutes are paradoxical figures, for they can represent both the affirmation and the subversion of social structures […] As public women who sell their bodies in a market dominated by male buyers, prostitutes seem to reinforce patriarchal capitalism, yet they can also be seen as exploited workers and potential revolutionaries" (re: "Introduction"). She's so close, yet disturbingly myopic (similar to Holocaust media focusing on Jews alone, versus the entirety of the victims affected by Western greed run amok; e.g., the "Silence=Death" Project, from 1987 onwards).
(artist: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner)
The point, here, is that upon reading Smith at all, I immediately thought of my own approach (towards reversing abjection); i.e., as challenging her biological emphasis that furthers abjection; re: to stop that by leaning into various expectations concerning whores, deliberately subverting monstrous-feminine language to defy the usual benefactors (which includes the middle class). I thus found Smith and I coming at the same problem from vastly different vantage points (and, at times, cross purposes)—her from pre-WW2 Berlin and I from Metroidvania (and Amazons) in the present space and time (regarding media orbiting real events that Metroidvania concern, on and offstage): Smith the straight Gen-X academic (born in 1972, according to her book) focusing worryingly on "women" with disturbingly white, cis and middle-class flavors, versus my trans millennial's work (born in 1986) expanding the scope of worker liberation to not turn my nose up at such matters; i.e., whores are monsters of a polity of marginalities, not white German women alone. Furthermore, Gothic shows how history goes beyond "real" cities, the political reality of trans people (and other minorities) taking class war (and its cultural and racial intersections) to half-real territories (re: Metroidvania, in my case) that Smith shies away from (despite the book title; i.e., mostly relegating her analysis to oil paintings; e.g., Kirchner's 1914 "Friedrichstraße," above).
In other words, I found myself altogether intrigued and leery of my discovery—driven both to ruminate on Smith for the duration of my visit; i.e., while staying with my partner at their home, but also elsewhere on my own. In the ER, for example, I found myself eager to jot down my immediate thoughts; re: while being needled by Smith's words in ways that spoke to my own work punching up at hers. This continued after my holiday ended, my thoughts percolating aggressively while watching a CScottyW WR for Metroid Fusion (2002, next page); i.e., after returning home from my partner's, I began to recall my hospital visit (and thoughts I experienced, at the time): vis-à-vis Smith and my past recent work on Amazons (re: "Regarding My Amazon Research"), me being utterly baffled by just how much Smith was omitting in her own discussion on whores and the Germanic (the "Gothic" actually an English creation with German roots, the whole of its scholarship commonly dismissed outright by snobs, and for which I can smell a naysayer a mile away). Medusa is a giantess, the censor standing in her alien shadow.
In short, I was the ideal if not intended or even target reader of Smith's book. And faced with her problematic arguments while having tackled sex work myself for years (and having written six books on the subject regarding monsters; re: "It Began with a Whisper," 2025), I began to synthesize Smith with CScottyW in all my usual, multimedia, an-Com, "gay Gothic" ways: the Amazon as warrior whore who induces, through sight and other sensations, a feeling of intense terror (and excitement) inducing extremes worthy of a heart attack, mid-moral-panic. "She mighty mighty" rings a little truer when one is worried about her own heart (especially when she likes gorgons and Amazons), and I wrote this section a bit "under the gun"; re: after having spent more time than I like wrestling with intimations of mortality (turning Wordsworth upside-down); e.g., I had fucked my partner while thinking about my heart, but also those frisky warrior whores, the Amazons, and all their usual effects on said heart (regardless of its current symptoms).
So, for a bit of extra fun, here's some additional food for thought surrounding all these things—an oriel window into how my mind usually works, mid-research; i.e., while developing Gothic Communism using Metroidvania; re: as a holistic liminal process, one (for me) that flows, at times, through streams of consciousness, and vibes with all the usual things I play with: differently than other nerds like Smith do. As a queer nerd, horror junkie, and sex worker who revels in the traditional language of whores neglected by Smith's book, my enjoying of Creed's monstrous-feminine stems from a Numinous (thus transformative) rebellious potential afforded by categorically nude monstrosities (and all whores are monsters, nude or not). Cognitive dissonance is the point.
Lastly, to call it "essay" might be a tad generous (owing to its conversational nature); instead, I wrote it for fun while musing on death (and hardly for the first time; re: "Facing Death: What I Learned Mastering Metroidvania," 2024), essentially serving as a companion piece to go alongside my usual Metroidvania work: weaponizing nudity through Gothic means for different aims; re: state's rights vs worker rights, generally using the same dialectical-material language (not psychoanalytical models, like Creed does) to further or reverse abjection, thus profit. Profit is abjection, which the whore reverses out of revenge—by finding joy under fascism while doing so! "Poor people gonna rise up and get their share."
Essay Body
While capital needs genocide to function and fascism is capital decaying by design, marginalized workers feel fascism differently among themselves and sooner than more privileged workers. This essay considers the joy required to survive fascism when it arrives; as it is already here, I want to consider it through the joy I experience regarding whores, specifically the gorgons and Amazons of Metroidvania, and how both tie to revolution as a holistic, half-real enterprise reversing abjection. We'll examine Metroid Fusion, Jill Smith, and some of my friends and I—not separately but part of a larger ongoing equation. To it, I'll have just enough time to lay out the facts, "setting the table" for future dialogs.
Earlier in "Regarding my Amazon Research," I wrote "Samus is a genocidal maniac who kills planets resembling our own." Keeping the above context in mind, I'd like to share some further thoughts; i.e., that emerged while watching CScottyW's latest Fusion WR the morning after I returned; re: from my health scare, and after reading Jill Smith. Fusion is a game I greatly enjoyed from my youth, and CScottyW is someone I've interviewed before as an adult (re: "Mazes and Labyrinths: Speedrunning Metroidvania – CScottyW," 2021). Like a heroine in a castle she repeatedly returns to, this essay has me revisiting older points made, and not for the first time. The rest of this essay is what I wrote earlier today—with myself effectively commenting on Samus, Scotty and Smith per the abjection process: the ghost of an ongoing debate, one had by me among our former selves (and various left-behinds). It's merely a taste, offering new takes on old things discussed before. Growth happens through repeated challenge, not complacency.
To it, Samus is the token Amazon sent to recapitate Medusa; i.e., the female (or intersex, non-white, Pagan, etc) brain in a jar that, once reinstalled (or "rediscovered" by the state inventing her dominion for monomyth slaughter), decapitates her again—all to police her wandering womb for Capitalist Realism: recolonizing a given colonial space out of petty state revenge or denying it (for equally petty motives) to a native population suing for peace/right of return (commonly framed as pirates or pests, but also zombies raped in their sleep, during false flags). When nature becomes unruly thus adverse to exploitation, the state historically retreats from a land they've bombed for profit; in Metroidvania, Samus nukes the planet but, alongside the map she routinely explores, remains haunted by her own crimes and trauma(re: mirror syndrome). Abjection is abjection.
Similar to Rambo, Samus works through stealth and speed—one made or captured by patriarchal authority (re: Pygmalion) that, sanctioned for temporary release/parole, "speedruns" through a given territory to (re)prime it for present destruction and future repopulation; re: per settler-colonial models (with heteronormative and Cartesian elements) that scorch the earth; i.e., as completely uninhabitable, reseeding the pariah land's wreckage to bury state secrets and euthanize/exile the Amazon as Pavlov's rabid dog: by banishing her, post-op, to hang the thief, mercenary, and whore as all-in-one, but also the race car cyborg as conspicuously female/monstrous-feminine, an iron maiden/war bitch. All whores are monsters, but some get notably more attention than others (e.g., white women); the one's capital hates the most are Communist, and which it tokenizes Amazon novelties to destroy while weaponizing themselves during military optimism (and insect politics): a WASP-y parasitoid furthering the Protestant ethic by moving money through nature, mid-genocide (re: me vis-à-vis Patel and Moore).
(artist: Ryan Barry)
To it, Samus is a token cop, thus less expendable than her victims that, when destroyed by the virginal huntress, reflect past betrayals back in her face; i.e., which the state will then blame Samus for, mid-abjection—reversing DARVO through obscurantism, the entire charade a Promethean structure thereof, and one that preserves their own power by replacing older scapegoats with their killers holding the knife; re: in gendered, monstrous-feminine language (e.g., "War Vaginas" and phallic women/Archaic Mothers, 2021) that, all the same, includes Cartesian and settler-colonial elements—of the whore's abject, uncanny revenge and reversal of said revenge, its explosive unheimlich spelling out a larger ongoing cycle: of the monumental power struggle's imbalance and harm capital routinely demands, and whose routine shows of force Metroidvania stage for endless exploration, thus exploitation through lethal fireworks: the state is always hungry and ready to disguise said hunger as "home defense." Defense is a lie, "space NATO[1]" blaming the whore pointing the finger at herself, mid-gaslight.
Saber-rattling through ceaseless military exercise—and one had by the rat acting the cat inside a giant, enclosed, cage-like maze—we're left with a fearsome self-hating gargoyle. Patrolling home dressed up as Elsewhere, and regardless of the form a given Destroyer takes, the castle holding it remains a colony to cannibalize repeatedly by the state calling the shots; i.e., advertising rape fears by replacing Samus with a robotically numb, braindead, sleepwalker version of herself. She's basically Ms. Pac-Man chasing her own ghost: "My hungry ass will eat just about anything" (Kevin Sanji's "to catch a predator but Chris Hansen is hungry af," 2023). So says the elite (and those who serve them) before skinning their prey (the curious cat) alive; i.e., the state is undead and ravenous; eventually the procedure becomes ouroborotic, the brothel a necrotic warzone come home to roost: dead labor feeding on living labor, from Marx to us (re: "The World Is a Vampire," 2024).
(exhibit 3: Source: Jason Rochlin's "Metroid Dread Needs to Live Up To Fusion's Iconic SA-X," 2021. Fusion's SA-X is literally the ghost of empire—spectres of Caesar, Medusa and Marx speaking to Samus' former abuse[r]s chasing her [and the player] around; i.e., while she's stripped bare, deprived of the usual armor she enjoys: the eyes and arms of the state hijacked by imperial victims, and from whose titular metroids' monster DNA vaccinates Samus from the X parasite at a molecular level: two-way stochastic terrorism, the confusion of nonstop police alarms levied at a former cop, the ghost of colonizer and colonized occupying the same concentric, psychomachic, anisotropic, hauntological, and Walpolean suit of armor/castle: the Medusa versus the Amazon, "solving for X" on Radcliffe's usual Black-Veil Russian dolls, mise-en-abyme.
With any Gothic face off, doubles invite for troubling myriad comparison. To it, there are various interpretations besides the one I gave, above; e.g., X = Indigenous revenge versus state revenge, while gazing into Death, vaso vagal. Regardless, class war involves—among many other things also at play—imitation, which unto itself commonly has whores and pimps occupying the same deathly disguises [often with a "mil spec" flavor that sees the cop outclassed by itself made alien; i.e., as much as any perceived foe it confuses for itself, mid-abjection].)
Such staging is suitably tragic; e.g., like Icarus, Sisyphus or Prometheus, but also the Gorgon and the Amazon revived in hauntological variants (which Metroidvania are). Like any Gothic heroine, Samus operates under questionable inheritance; i.e., chasing the Numinous as "dragon" to slay on repeat/command—a monomyth, ghost-of-the-counterfeit whore to pimp during mirror syndrome, and one whose flexible, neoliberal triangulation by state powers (and their modular persecution networks) always have capital playing out in small: a state of exception whose sign of persecution leaps, like a hot potato (or a virus), from victim to victim—including cops who have "served their purpose." Living on borrowed time, their FOMO clemency (and dependency on state arbitration) affords through expendable heroism and menticidal expectations: proving they aren't the whore by paradoxically walking into a trap (the state of exception) to conduct TERF-grade witch hunts; i.e., one where they perform whore-like violence, and violence the state will attach to them as soon as the job—the state's dirty work—is done; re: the euthanasia effect, which remains suitably recursive, ergodic and unmappable during childish invasion fears (a resisting of conquest and liberation tied to fatally nostalgic homes, from Radcliffe onwards): a playground of genocide instructed through abjection.
Through action as much as space conducive to action, power jumps around, but canonically does so through Metroidvania; i.e., whose state authors "tilt" the pinball machine to land power in their pockets. As such, the game is both one of play and word games, and whose double standards at play are also temporary and prone to shift during the whore's paradox (camping rape). Samus is the maiden/good whore "space plumber[2]" until she is not, and someone routinely forced to strip/armor up and weaponize to prove she is daddy's good girl once more. The preacher's daughter gunning for outsiders, it's only a matter of time before she's exiled again, forcing the cycle to repeat until Ozymandias desiccates the planet: her turn to be replaced by her own armor as haunted by the usual ghosts (from Walpole, onwards; re: Hans Staats). So does "pot meet kettle" in a very literal sense—and all while swept up in the usual romances' bellicose gloomth; e.g., the infected space station or murky planet underbelly infused with the postcolonial rage made Numinously blind (as Medusa classically is, left).
(artist: u/mr_merns)
All the while, the whore is dualistic, working within virgin/whore but also terrorism/counterterrorism; i.e., as something to view and perform, thus interpret, during the cryptonymy process (and its liminal hauntology of war) furthering or reversing abjection. A house under capital is always under arrest, is always alien—meaning through cycles of instability and "boom or bust" harvest commenting on "home" as abattoir in disguise. Despite her perceived obedience, then, Samus embodies the minotaur or Gorgon inside this cycle, making her the central monster as much as Mother Brain, the wicked stepmother or Venus double, is—full of secrets (and pain) written on (and with) stolen goods, wherein she uses "her" hard-fought materiel to betray her own female, non-white, GNC, and/or Indigenous past again and again: the white savior and Indian playing at Athena pimping Medusa, but chased by "her own" shadow, Peter-Pan-style. She must solve Radcliffe's mystery before it's" too late," making such stories the girlboss version of Escape from New York (1981); i.e., with touches of Carpenter's 1982 Thing remake exploring imitation/replacement phobias on colonial frontiers, moving the goalpost using the Imperial Boomerang.
The fact remains, development is dialectical-material, thus dualistic; my synthesis of Gothic theories yield pro-state and pro-labor functions, including cryptonymy furthering or reversing abjection. The whore's complicit cryptonymy is one soldiering against itself—a dialectical-material gradient that, from Federici and Creed to me, comments on the usual policing in different forms of police violence cannibalizing token elements the Medusa must reclaim through her worshippers; i.e., on the same stages, revolutionary cryptonymy using the same language of show-and-conceal that fascism does: to make the whore into an abject guerrilla who has her own duality to consider (re: "Policing the Whore").
To that, cops are undercover (as Samus is) but so are all whores—a process of concealment and code that Jill Smith—probably unaware of cryptonymy and abjection—still calls a "whore's ball" (re: the 1988 Hydra event, in West Berlin): a place that defies expectations, but specifically what whores "should" look like; re: not like whores, but gentrified in ways, I would argue, that historically decay into the very monsters capital cages and kettles, mid-abjection. What do you think the crooked cross was? A censor merging corporation and state to bottle Pandora by gagging her and slicing off her head (abjection from the start). Intent doesn't matter, outcomes do!
(source: D.G. Hewitt's "17 Reasons Why Germany's Weimar Republic Was a Party-Lovers Paradise," 2018).
The fact remains, whores can be cops, including false rebels of the fascist sort; they can also be functional rebels of a proletarian sort, moving power anisotropically towards workers and away from the state—re: flow (of power) determines function, not aesthetics, abjection a two-way street. So while Smith writes about disrupting discussions of prostitutes, moving them away from sexual deviancy and destitution (choosing to focus on assimilation, via "bourgeois prostitutes" she calls, among other things, cocottes), the fact remains that queer folk and other minorities don't have the luxury of mere segregation. We can look like angels in the streets and act like freaks in the sheets—and having a historical understanding of that exact effect in Berlin (while America operates like the Fourth Reich) remains useful—but I would also stress how cryptonymy affords a reversal of Smith's argument: freaks in the streets (and angels in the sheets, or just freaks wherever).
Not only that, consensual nudity disrupts compelled clothing as much as compelled exposure, but also views about things being "whore-like" for abjection purposes; i.e., nudity simply a tool for opposing aims, insofar as workers challenging the state (as a police structure) goes. Smith can talk about clothed "stealth" whores till the cows come home, but sooner or later an actual collective, visible stance must be taken against capital (which Weimar didn't do nearly enough to stop fascism). I would argue, raw nudity works just as well in that respect.
Furthermore, Amazonomachia is half-real. So we can use the language of monsters like code and disguise to change hearts and minds (thus abjection); i.e., doing so versus abandonment, like Smith did in 2013. Her study of Berlin's liminalities—while certainly fascinating (and obscure) from a purely historical perspective—feels a tad myopic and exclusionary (as third wave feminism does, albeit to a lesser extent than second wave); i.e., by focusing on bourgeois whores who are female, cis and white, but also clothed and ostensibly polite, versus not. Tone-police much? Your prescription historically serves to pacify labor before it is killed (re: Hilter).
In short, when Berlin's battleground returns, like a flying castle, to the dialogs of scholarship and imagination, I find myself recalling Hogle's response to Punter's The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day (1980):
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).
And yet, alongside the heart-stopping power of ghosts and tombs, we find the Amazonian "tomb raiders" of Metroidvania; i.e., caught between not just Hogle's counterfeit (and its ghost, mid-abjection), but Smith's fixation with whores; re: that don't look like whores, meaning monsters to abject. Any refusal or even neglect in that area contributes to the usual voids; i.e., those attached umbilically to punitive cultural signifiers that whores are known for and reach towards the usual panickers out of an imaginary past loaded with actual genocide: hugs from the Numinous patchwork (echoing Giger's xenomorph)!
(artist: Bryton Spurgeon)
The fact remains, "where there's smoke, there's fire," and the earliest book burnings from 1930s Germany (the Weimar graveyard, from there on out) sought to purify all capital's decadence—in ways no one survived unscathed! We must rise from the ashes—not bury ourselves, but during live burial as a liminal p(rop)osition; i.e., through capital looping historical-material brutalities and cryptonyms (as whores are, again, classically relegated to "ancient" graveyards; re: me vis-à-vis Segewick's 1980 Coherence of Gothic Fictions and B.B. Wagner's 2020 exploration of graveyard prostitution: from Rome to "Rome").
My point in Gothic versus those allergic to it (re: Smith) is that class, culture and race rely on a wardrobe of concealment and advertisement; i.e., cryptonymy's double operation (re: Hogle) that, in my mind, must subvert and weaponize whatever we can: to dismantle capital at home, where home actually is or how it manifests, mid-abjection; re: Metroidvania as the danger disco, its own whore's ball that embraces the flexibility of a given whore's clothing (and bodily expression) to include public nudism as monstrous, naked, and wildly free. Home is monstrous and whores are monsters who can look ladylike or not; the holistic nature of my work prefers a spectrum of representation and intersectional, solidarized performance versus one select group endlessly poured over (re: cocottes). For me, that's what Metroidvania are: a brothel of "ass warfare," one cursed from undeath rising from the grave, thoroughly allergic to de facto value judgements like Smith's curious knowledge gap[3] (and penchant for disregarding "ancient" things[4])!
Instead of the usual reindeer games, Smith gushes about Berlin and its bourgeois whores who "look normal" (re: not like whores); I see her and respond much in the same I did while learning about Marx's homophobia in 2024 (re: "Making Marx Gay"), or Magnus Hirschfeld's devaluing of androgynes in 2025:
By the fin de siècle, the androgyne was perceived as a monster of sexual and moral ambiguity, often identified with other "outsiders" such as masochists, sadists, homosexuals, and lesbians. Eventually even Magnus Hirschfeld, the sexologist who defended male homosexuals, lesbians, and transvestites, condemned the androgyne for its supposed lack of harmony. Greeks and Romans had thought androgynes beautiful, but modern scientists could no longer agree. They were now perceived as misshapen freaks. True, there were those tried to revive the older image of the androgyne as a symbol of perfect harmony in order to defend homosexuals; for them, the tender youth with girlish body and male genitals provided a corrective to aggressively masculine symbols of power. But in general the distinction between normal and abnormal held, and the androgyne as a biological monster was allowed no happy ending. Respectability had to be fortified to resist the onslaught of those who were rediscovering their bodies and attacking dominant manners and morals (source: Nationalism and Sexuality).
The crux for this regression is always bourgeois, and "bourgeois" is the very adjective Smith assigns; i.e., to her object of study (whores) while alienating her readers from the very alien things demanding reclamation (also whores): our nudity and whorish, monstrous-feminine signifiers (the question asked by Hydra's whores—though someone tongue-in-cheek—still Capitalist Realist, in my opinion). Respectability is a charnel house, one in which the very cocottes from Smith's research were buried alive! Silence is genocide, which we must camp by giving voice to the unspeakable: in a world where all workers are whores under capital, albeit to different degrees and flavors of exploitation (re: "Thesis Statement," 2023). Kill your darlings; you have only to lose your chains!
(source: "Kicks after Six: Always Another Castle," 2025; model and artist: Maybel & Jackie and Persephone van der Waard)
So often, this outcry involves nude monsters (which whores generally are). While discretion can be the better part of valor concerning liberation, covering up entirely is foolish, as its ostracizes the already-vulnerable; i.e., for respectability and profit, which furthers abjection by doing fascism's work for it (closeting the whore)—in effect, the work of the very liberal sorts who helped fascism rise to power on either side of the Atlantic (from Non-Compete's 2025 "Third-Wayism and the Liberal-Fascist Bargain," which I read at the hospital in between Smith's Coquette):
As for Sellers, he is repeating the same mistakes which many preceding liberals have made: the hubristic notion that fascism is a force which can be controlled through shrewd political maneuvering [on par with Smith's coquettes flirting with fascism, which—in case anyone forget—let to the entire city's destruction]. This self-deception which liberals fall into, leading them to believe that they can manage fascism, has led to the downfall of many a liberal democracy. History provides numerous precedents where liberals enabled and empowered fascists under the mistaken belief that such brutal political currents could be contained. It happened in Italy, leading to the fascist domination of Benito Mussolini and Italy's ruin. It happened in Weimar Germany, leading up to the Third Reich and Germany's downfall. It happened with Pinochet, who was backed by Chilean liberal centrists, resulting in decades of strife for that nation. Again and again, throughout history, liberals have thought they could manipulate and maintain control over fascists. And time and again this has led to strife, chaos, and ruin.
As stated before, this dangerous tendency often surfaces precisely when working-class consciousness begins to challenge the hegemony of bourgeois liberalism. The mere consideration of extending an olive branch to a fascist figure like Musk signals deep-seated opportunism which has historically been quite ruinous to liberal parties. The lesson from history is undeniable: fascism must be opposed uncompromisingly. Those who would befriend fascists, whether through explicit alliances or opportunistic political maneuvering, must be resisted as strenuously as the fascists themselves, lest history's greatest calamities be repeated.
It is an unfortunate fact that bourgeois liberals do not ultimately seek to build a world free of oppression, for all their pretty words. Rather, they cling to the capitalist political economy which is built upon class division that brutalizes and dominates the majority of humanity. Fascism and liberalism are distinct ideologies with distinct political programs and institutions. They are not one in the same. They emerge from different material conditions and they serve different factions of the ruling class who have conflicting views about how best to rule over the workers of the world. But in terms of function they are one in the same [emphasis, me]. Both exist to serve and defend capital (source).
And in reading that, do you really think there's any kind of place for Smith's "bourgeois cocotte" in fascism's American revival? We're in quite the pickle, one enforced historically by women against their own kind, but also other marginalized groups that pimp themselves (out of convenience and desperation). Resistance must be become, as it were, naked, thus voiced through nudity itself as monstrously cloaked and bare at the same time; re: "When the Man comes around, show him your Aegis." This includes token servants of capital gentrifying whores, whose worrying lack of nudity needs to be addressed by our own weaponizing of state monopolies thereof; re: by "putting… the pussy on the chainwax!" (or the sass in the ass, below):
(source: "Sexist Ire: Persecuting Iconoclasts (and Iconoclastic Vice Characters)," 2025; artist: Harmony Corrupted, commissioned by Persephone van der Waard)
"Th[e] solution is communism," Non-Compete writes, in their own Substack. I would agree—albeit with a focus on the nude body language of whore-as-monster that Smith appears to abstain from. We're at the point where arguing about intent or to matters of degree doesn't really matter. Fascism is here and whores of all kinds will—like Samus in her suit of armor—be used to cage and betray their own class interests alongside cultural and racial ones that profit only abuses for itself, mid-abjection.
The fact remains, Medusa's powers can reverse abjection (thus profit), but they won't work if she's forced to wear sunglasses, but also any clothing of a politer sort against her will. Respectability politics are merely a debate with capital's usual mercenaries, one where no one wins but the richest of the rich (the madames and the pimps). But more than anyone, the usual victims are the very people who need to weaponize their bodies (and nudity of said bodies) to serve worker needs over state needs: those who "look like whores," insofar as "looks like" really means "deviance and destitution"; i.e., per Smith's own arguments furthering abjection, itself meaning anyone capital assigns that unhappy status to; e.g., people of color, religious minorities, women, GNC or Indigenous persons, etc: as workers forced to fight for scraps while dividing themselves, as usual. How about we seize the means of production for all workers, instead? Communism fucks away from Omelas.
So enough with the veiled Red Scare tactics; make Marx gay and naked! Unsheathe your "swords," even if the metaphor is admittedly mixed (the weaponry of one's booty or thighs, above and below, having militant, class-war qualities to them). Rebellion should be hungry and loud, for there's no other way that abjection reverses; or as Creed showed in 1993, whores rule through terror, shock and awe, and have since ancient times: as weapons of fear (about military force and sexual violence) that workers can subvert, thus reclaim for various aims "in the sack" or out (e.g., anal sex; re: "Our Sweet Revenge," 2025). Whether they mean to or not, a desire for silence historically leads white middle-class women to punch down against what they associate with trauma; re: blaming the whore.
So while Smith herself doesn't quite argue "I just hate those 'obvi' whores and whores who aren't authentic Berliners and/or women," I cannot help but note a perceived lack of whores in her scholarship beyond "woman"; re: as suspiciously white, cis, European, middle-class and clothed (e.g., her fourth and final chapter, "Working Girls: White-Collar Workers and Prostitutes in Late Weimar Fiction[5]"). It feels notably regressive, regardless of intent—a SWERF-y attitude harkening nostalgically back, slumming-style, as much to Beauvoir's "woman is other" as to Edward Said noting (with some justice) the distinct lack or absence of any concrete mention of slavery in Mansfield Park (re: "Cornholing the Corn Lady," 2024).
Whores are agents of destruction, Smith, and suggesting we avoid that dichotomy as something that irrefutably exists in modern times is, I would argue, sheer folly begot from privilege defending Omelas (those who survived Weimar often came from luxury but also privilege, turning a blind eye to wider sufferings taking place in the shadow of state force, thus tokenization): so many sex workers can't afford luxuries like feting fancy balls with their clothes on (e.g., Mugi is a trans man who has to eat just like cis women do). Instead, they show their bellies on which the code is just as much the dialectical-material context of exchange, itself changing the direction power flows (versus pure aesthetics, alone). A rebellious whore is basically a pirate, then, one whose wealth redistributes through their bodies: survival sex work hybridizing victim and villain, turning into monstrous-feminine survivors of capital by transforming it through trade.
(artist: Mugiwara; sticker by Orpheon)
Rejecting the monstrous whore of the street while embracing the bourgeois whore in their place is not entirely Smith's argument—indeed, she condemns fixating on that tired binary and nothing else (to justify her work, similar to Frederic Jameson; see: Alex Link's "The Mysteries of Postmodernism, or, Fredric Jameson's Gothic Plots," 2009)—but there is something of a critical blind spot in her statements, and a dismissal of Gothic if only one made through preference for the classier sort of gentrified whores who hide the Aegis versus using it; re: her emphasis on "Berliner bourgeois cocottes" (and I thought I was myopic). While admittedly interesting to learn about as Smith's research topic, whores don't reduce to "women" or "female" at all[6]—a fact that should be kept in mind when studying those omitted by Smith, but also Hirschfeld, Creed, Freud, and countless other scholars. We must enlarge their minds (or their survivors' minds) to other realities besides clothed/unclothed (with print academics like Smith prone to kissing the asses of their publishers; re: her acknowledgments, which conclude with, "I am grateful to the respective presses for their permission [emphasis, me] to reprint this material").
As my work shows, we must build better temples, regardless if the holders of the kingdom keys sanction us; i.e., in light of encroaching fascism, which demands a willingness to play with all aspects of a castle and not just the parts that fancy us: whore's aren't just cocottes. There is always another castle, and the usual fascist fortresses—coming back, a century after Weimar—aim to cannibalize the usual victims of state treachery that whores embody. Silence is genocide, and covering nudity up silences nudity. Total clothing is total silence, which will not benefit us, should America itself go rabid; we must fight back in the shadow of such forces, acclimating to abjection as something to reverse through naked monstrosity, versus tokenizing to gatekeep the in-group, mid-holocaust—re:
When such a castle appears, it is time to be afraid; the colonial harvest is at hand. Yet, precisely because the state does not hold a monopoly over violence, terror and morphological expression, a demon or castle needn't spell our end; it can represent our sole means of attack, reclaiming said poetics' endless inventiveness to turn colonizer fears back into their hopelessly scared brains (source: "Prey as Liberators").
So is the whore's nude body (and monstrous poetics) a castle-like weapon; i.e., whose power must be reclaimed, mid-crisis, not abandoned. When the state condemns your home as alien, you must fight for it using what you got.
During the dialectic of the alien, we must not simply regard such things, but hug them as powerful tools to reverse abjection (thus profit). There's no one use for the appearance of "whore," as Smith semi-argues; nudity for the Amazon is a weapon to speak out with—i.e., regardless of the genders involved, silence is death as a thing to camp through darkness visible; e.g., "rape" in quotes, but also destroyer and victim language overlapping on said bodies; re: "we camp canon because we must," which requires calculated risk (especially the fear of imprisonment/the kept woman) through ludo-Gothic BDSM: infinite power in ways we shouldn't cover up, but speak out with regarding those who see us only to shriek "witch, whore, criminal, rube!" and so on. From a dialectical-material standpoint, the oldest profession bears the brunt of the oldest exploitation; i.e., surviving into the present, Medusa was a rape victim (re: Hadley) and whores are garbage that work with garbage to humanize themselves (re: "Hot Allostatic Load," 2015). The problem isn't that we're monsters but that monsters are dehumanized by capital (re: "Nature Is Food," 2024).
(artist: Hallie Cross)
However, just as no limit for profit exists, there is no limit for labor value through nudity and gender expression. For example, Hallie Cross is a "soft pleasure dom" with genderfluid components; i.e., as someone who is literally one of my project muses: a guerilla who fights their battles behind the safety of a phone screen taken inside one's home (or a public bathroom stall, above), and whose de facto education challenges state-corporate dogma. Such is revolutionary cryptonymy versus complicit, during abjection's tug-o'-war. Class war is ass war as extending to minorities of many different kinds; i.e., a polity of speech/consciousness versus not; e.g., disabled people, people of color and/or non-white bodies shapelier (and wilder) than is normally allowed (above).
Likewise, many sex workers are "ace" in ways that go beyond Smith's clothed "respectable" whores. Yet despite this purity test, I've come to see many stone-cold sluts enjoying their work anyways, getting down to business while taking pride in their nude aspects. To exclude all of that for a myopic historical fascination isn't novel; it's Puritanical, dumb and praxially inert, and rebellion requires devotion to greater powers than the bourgeoisie. Medusa will win in the end (re: state shift); we might as well avoid total annihilation if we can help it (climate change)!
So when Smith writes, "An institution that promotes sexual relations with emotional attachment, prostitution detaches love from sex," I want to ask them if they actually know what a prostitute is, or rather, for them to expand their definition to something that includes the likes of me and my friends loving the work we do together (e.g., Bunny and I, next page); re: having the whore's revenge against profit—nakedly as whores who get a great many things out of sex for money (often through public nudism but also sales of nudism we love to exhibit).
(artist, top: Teke)
Furthermore, when facing death, the reality of sex work and intimacy is that death, including "death" in quotes or perceptions thereof, is an aphrodisiac/general euphoric device dressed up in the language of "the hunt" (chercher la femme); i.e., "the dose makes the poison," the Gothic forcing the privileged to look on a dark half that literally stops their heart. When describing my condition to a fellow sex worker, they replied how they too had a bum ticker (specifically an extra heartbeat). In turn, heroes in classic myth are flawed usually to fatal extremes, having one foot in Hell (e.g., Achilles, Hippolyta or Persephone); all heroes are monsters, and all whores are monsters with heroic potential: to expose monstrous things to reclaim them, mid-paradox (which abjection is). Censorship is silence, and covering things up only demands an apocalypse: from us, speaking out, as segregation is no defense. Remind fascism just how charmed a life it's led; show them their dark Quixotic side on the Aegis—inviting terror as a paralytic, mind-altering device!
In other words, a desire to keep quiet and hide will not serve us—the moment we cover ourselves to flirt with Nazis being precisely the moment we surrender our power to our enemies telling us our own limits. And if you don't believe me, consider the silence of modern-day "YouTuber trans cocottes" like Contrapoints (The Kavernacle's "I Was RIGHT about BreadTube" or Hasanabi's "Why Did She Post This," both 2025) or PhilosophyTube (Quarantine Collective's "Why I’m done with PhilosophyTube," 2025; timestamp: 1825); i.e., people with privilege betray out of convenience, those with oppression betray out of desperation, and people with both betray out of convenience and desperation; e.g., white trans women needing to check their privilege despite their oppression (Essence of Thought's "Dear White Trans People, Palestinians Are Not Your Enemy," 2025).
The closet is a slow-acting guillotine; i.e., just the thought of sex is enough to get people censored (a thought crime "in the flesh"), and that is what we must uncover through the joy of reclamation: under fascism hunting us. We're not omitting anyone; we're also won't cover up to play nice.
Joy Under Fascism
Capital decays into fascism; under fascism, there must always be a whore to rape, including flirty maidens the state will rape regardless (and call "whore" and "good girl" all at once). As Amazons classically show, domestication is death; Smith's whores were too servile to effectively push back collectively with other minorities against fascism, a mistake present whores must avoid in order to joyously survive to mock our pimps: Medusa, beheaded, laughs back in her conqueror's faces. "Can't touch this!" she jeers, topping from below (the OG "power bottom"); i.e., while finding love despite her scars—to change shape as we require.
For lack of a better term, it's joy under fascism—an optimism in knowing they can't exterminate us in bad faith, and furthermore, that we can fight back and enjoy ourselves; i.e., doing so while using the same stages in good faith; e.g., Metroidvania or that which Metroidvania allude to (the corpse of empire). Indeed, we feel most alive while doing so (the Gothic paradox of vicarious danger speaking to real-life varieties in poetic, haunted-house ways); i.e., chasing such things down and harnessing their power for ourselves. Sex has power because the state tries to control it: the fire in our godly breasts (and backsides) to work a revolution with. The apologia is not of rape, but "rape" in quotes. So make it weird in healthy ways; remind fascists that even if they kill us, we're still cooler than they are!
(artist: Blxxd Bunny)
Think Dracula, Dead and Loving It (1995), but whores acting nakedly monstrous through their cryptonymy "doing Communism" to reverse abjection. Nudity isn't bodies alone, but frank expressions of feelings that nude expressions of whoring play a part in (with Bunny and I being platonic friends working on the same book series; re: "The Finale; or 'Sex, Drugs, and Rock 'n Roll!'" 2025)—not a death sentence when the chickens come home to roost, but a new lease on life!
Capital frames nudity (and clothing verging on nude) as alien, thus where its power lies—the latter to transform the former through labor as nude, including nudely negotiated (re: "Illustrating Mutual Consent" from "Paratextual Documents")! Capital makes us alien, giving us a tremendous bar to leverage them with: the very language of fearful sex and force, but also commerce as animalistic; i.e., in ways capital has isolated the elite (and their servants) from: the doomsday of a colony literally "gone to seed" (re: Mother Brain a vice character let out to seek Mother Nature's revenge).
Development "burns Rome" over time, not all at once; We must make fascism gay (which is to say, not fascism) by reclaiming what it steals and abuses in bad faith: to develop Gothic Communism with using the gorgon, the Amazon, and similar animal, medicalized beings' call of the wild, void, Hell, what-have-you as scaring fascism to death—for being so insulated by capital, shielded from that what it fears to a Numinous degree: a dire, supernaturally Pagan revenge seeming (though not really) "not of this Earth" (e.g., Grendel's mother but also GNC echoes of such mothers and their fat dumpers[7], below), the doors of Asprey's counterterror opened by us, for a change (and throughout history per Asprey's book)! Exposure becomes joy through a means of fighting back; re: "on the Aegis."
(artist: Persephone van der Waard)
And yet, paradox plays into what we choose to show and conceal to varying degrees of (un)dress and illusion (re: darkness visible; see: "Doubles, Dark Forces, and Paradox," 2023). To disrobe is to seize control in ways canon teaches, but workers camp—all with an essence of speed and caution that go hand-in-hand: as workers born into a world made to exploit us, and one that can only change if we take matters into our own hands at whatever speed we need to. Our aim should be explicit, regardless if our art is legally obscene or not (subject to change, with Project 2025 and intermittent laws; e.g., FSC v. Paxton).
Such flagrancy is ultimately a question of moderation, not moderacy; i.e., when society calls us poison, poison is the cure. Just how denying ourselves water is to die of thirst, to deny ourselves a particular branch of information or technology is to make ourselves terminally ignorant/susceptible. Evolution is messy and crude; in exercising crude power for ourselves, we must camp our own holocaust, rape, and profound survival—re: finding similarity amid difference, ergo intersectional solidarity through paradoxical means (see: "Healing from Rape"). Nudity is a vector of exchange, including rebellious exchange! It's a positivity we find by making it among friends while fighting back to literate all workers all at once.
Always punch up at fascism, including those who defend it (with "fascism," the word, not even making the index in Smith's book). That is what ludo-Gothic BDSM does, challenging profit through rape play camping capital's Cartesian desire (therefore genocide through the whore's revenge/paradox of whores and rape; re: "Rape Reprise" and "Concerning Rape Play"); i.e., to penetrate nature and torture her secrets out from an increasingly dark womb feared as "extended," alien and unknown by "thinking beings":
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: A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, 2017).
The praxial idea is to reverse the above hold on things; i.e., by projecting ourselves onto things the state normally sees as safe, thus will attack when confused—by exposing itself through accidental confessions, mid-pareidolia (the whore in the house, making the nuclear model melt inside people's panic-stricken brains)!
In other words, ass war is asymmetrical. Two warring confederacies, Medusa and her ilk fight the state as things to embody "in small" but also in speed as capital decays: fearing nature more and more, embodied by workers who, classified as terrorists, will have to rely on this sinful status to survive state abuse—through a steady and increasing "pull," its emergent strategies of deception and craft (e.g., songs, dances, theatre, and other oral/written traditions, often surrounding food, pain, fighting and fertility myths) cut from the same cloth as our executioner's pirate hoods! These are very old fears and useful for that reason alone, Smith—i.e., the more fascism fears us, per moral panic, the more power we have as capital speeds up; the more it speeds up, the more we use their fear against them (as routinely happens in Metroidvania; re: "She Fucks Back," 2024). Whores are historically chattelized—alien stewards of nature who defend nature; i.e., as something to point towards doomsayers harming the planet, honesty a means of practice through armored exposure (the usual buffers; e.g., phone screens).
To that, an essence of station and speed also go hand-in-hand—to feel the rush of excitement when making friends to unite under a larger cause, and to realize that, while time is of the essence, there's still time to take time back through these labors speedrunning Communism, mid-death-race. The paradox is doing that at full speed; i.e., doing what's required, resting and relaxing as needed (for workers are not born simply to work). As we prepare the measure of our day's labor and repose, we arm "for bear" during the usual struggles at full speed: to meet our enemies on the streets of imagination, including their graveyards as things to happily race through—on chariots of the gods, following the footsteps of older trailblazers we love and respect (e.g., Mike Jittlov for me, below); i.e., the motion and the freight, but also the camouflage. A better world will come, but we have to visibly fight for it—not by running away from fascism when it arrives, but towards danger as something to subvert "on the Aegis" (not exactly Stalin's infamous "not one step back" order but certainly having a similar level of determination): "Ass is whera I berongu to. I won't gibu yuu ze ass!" (Sora the Troll, "When Japanese Voice Actor Pronounces 'The Earth,'" 2022). Whores love paradox, Omelas included.
(source)
They also command respect and communicate as Gothic castles do; i.e., through motion in stillness: an opaque place of instability that begets ergodic motion (therefore revelation), once inside; re: Bakhtin's chronotope, but also castles in the flesh tied concentrically to larger alien containers with a human stamp (and vice versa). What form the whore takes will belong to the past as partly imaginary, thus playful. The past is not only imperfect when exposed, but reinvented in Gothic ways that allow for useful reinvention provided play allows for open communication; i.e., during ludo-Gothic BDSM's expanded domains of play that take what is useful from historically-albeit-limited contributions like Smith, but also critique them similar to Hirschfeld or hell, even CScottyW (re: "Nature vs the State," 2025).
Conclusion
To conclude (and a couple closing points, three pages), we must play with whores as endemic to castles, learning to tell the difference when whores of different kinds look alike, the Nazi reviving an abusive medieval versus our own Gothic Communism celebrating the very liberation: of those whores that Smith and her bourgeois cocottes arguably turned a blind eye to (what Jameson would call blank parody, or "a statue with blind eyeballs"; re: Postmodernism, 1991). We must become nude in ways that protect us apotropaically from attackers—to freeze them in place and give us our voice as one with anger inside it, but also wild frenzy and unfettered joy!
Indeed, it's an ode to joy that convulses, Keats' plaintiff nightingale with a darker side; re: "Psychosexual Martyrdom," 2024; e.g., Cuwu and I, next page, embodying such things; i.e., as lessons to pass on to future workers, expressing joy in our own power to reclaim our labor (therefore humanity) while being remembered for the struggle: playing with fire stolen back from the gods! Being queer isn't a curse, nor are we "useless eaters"; we're taonga[8] forming pockets of resistance, inspiring ourselves through shared joy under fascism. Liberation is phenomenological as anything "final" or "complete," universality an attempt by workers to diversify towards liberation. It's an uphill battle but a worthwhile one, its development arriving in stages and phases, not totality all at once. There's bound to setbacks, heartbreak and disappointment among the breakthroughs. Keep pushin' and demystify state veils! Find joy by liberating parts of yourself while being oppressed! Break all monopolies, sex or otherwise! Survive through joy!
(source: "My Experiences," 2024; artists: Persephone van der Waard and Cuwu)
"Progress requires struggle," said Frederick Douglass; to closet ourselves in clothes is to functionally grow limp, devoid of struggle (though clothes and situational disguise are obviously necessary if and when fascism crystalizes). Tokenization is limp, selling out for Judas gold (re: Contrapoints being a liberal Zionist apologizing for genocide; Bad Empanada's "Zionist Narcissism Personified," 2025). If we're only not careful but not brave (which tokens aren't, cocottes or otherwise), the death of the Weimar Republic will repeat at home (versus overseas, with Palestine). Nudity is courage and abstinence doesn't work. Reclaim what terrifies the state: Medusa uncloaked and uncorked (next page), something whose pussy is "slain" in quotes (taking power back for ourselves ["T4T"] if only by realizing we have value, "as is")!
Of course, Smith isn't completely wrong. Berlin was (and is) a liminal space—one haunted by sex and force with militant, "Germanic" fractals censored by world war (destruction of the colony but also the satellite state). A similar blind spot exists within Metroidvania—the cure for said blindness existing inside not just spaces of play but a willingness to hug the alien inside-outside: for its alien status as paradoxically liberatory versus canonical varieties punching down, the battle for universal liberation happening onstage and off. This requires nudity to work, because rebellion is always, to some degree, naked and monstrously violent (though cryptonymy allows for "nudity" while clothed; re: Segewick's "Imagery of the Surface," 1981): the heralds of capital's demise the moment we free ourselves, not before! The state is straight (re: "Understanding Vampires," 2024); we fags must feed to survive, sucking the state dry of our own blood. Repress this, assholes! Where was that arrow fired from?
(artist: Hallie Cross)
And lastly, the whore's revenge (therefore escape by transforming the home while paradoxically inside it[9]) includes by touching hearts and minds in ways that veer into literal camp (farce being the second outcome when history repeats; re: Marx' "Eighteen Brumaire," 1852), and camping the canon historically takes medieval language to camp whores for the benefit of workers and nature (re: "Camping the Canon, 2023"); e.g., Monty Python borrowing from Shakespeare, but also Chaucer to say some fairly Marxist things (re: "Informed (Ironic) Consumption"). Whatever's said, revolution is perennial, and whores must look like whores at least part of the time; i.e., because that is how you reverse abjection—by playing with the alien to humanize it (with nothing more alien, thus divided and policed by capital, than sex, and generally dressed up in the language of war as "camp," above). Anything else is a band aid for a bullet, fascism fired from capital and speeding towards us. Find joy in fighting it, reversing abjection through the cryptonymy process "on the Aegis." Like any good whore, rebellion is sneaky, funny and crude, but also educated in ways both of the school and the street. It's our job to survive by not being fooled by illusions while using ours against our would-be puppeteers. Show them no quarter! Make 'em beg!
Better yet, make it a dalliance—a dance with death that leaves fascism visibly gasping for air! Exploitation and liberation share the same stage; so give them a heart attack, your Aegis the fabled means of doing so—arresting the very atrial mechanisms that genocide all workers at different speeds (the strip tease versus skipping foreplay outright, "cutting to the chase")! Fascism rules through fear—to blacken our hearts until we lose the will to live, let alone fight. Reclaiming said darkness helps workers not only survive, but solidarize and speak out through itself as subversively Amazonian (or gorgon-esque), the alien survivor thriving in spite of state actors chasing her. The hunt is half-real, but goes both ways; we have what they want, which we can deny them outstaying their welcome while enjoying ourselves: "look, don't touch!" The Aegis is a shield, door and weapon, depending on who's using it. Context matters, nudity a powerful teaching device.
Capital's historical refrain is torment for profit; i.e., capital is a bonafide "Torment Nexus" whose historical-material trauma turns people into cops or victims, but also survivors; the trick is being a survivor who meets other survivors through performative code[10] they communicate as comrades do: as "danger" to perform (theatrical danger) without leading fascism (actual danger) into safe spaces. Good actors root out bad actors before infiltration-by-imitation occurs, grossing them out or scaring and/or pissing them off, nails-on-a-chalkboard, so they drop the mask; i.e., while we're having fun/feeding our appetites to the fullest. Find people with mana, then play "keep away" from the Nazis. Survival is criminal, but it needn't be harmful provided we keep the cops at bay—the thing workers have in common that's important to all of them in different ways; re: a pedagogy of the oppressed achieved through similarity amid difference, separating the wheat from the chaff. And that isn't hard to do; fascism fears everything and feels constantly bitter about its own self-loathing rules—i.e., they're miserable, which we can remind them of constantly while eluding their toxic traps (think Jerry the mouse from the old cartoon): they're not gods, but sad, angry dorks workers can humiliate by existing in spite of them, valuing consent (the ability to negotiate) as Nazi kryptonite. They call us weak, yet "stare and tremble."
That's what joy under fascism is—Amazonian code exploring stigmatic tolerances that, when viewed, make our bullies self-destruct and capital transform away from replicating such things. It confuses what workers like, want and need (often through desperation), but doesn't monopolize such matters. Fantastical thoughts and actions aren't the same. Instead, excitement is anisotropic in its polarity as reversible; i.e., during calculated risk performed by workers with "types," fantasy can flow power vampirically towards whores skillfully arbitrating the Gothic zones of (dark) fantasy, onstage and off.
So go HAM, my hellions; breast, booty or thighs—whatever the meat (or Metroidvania displaying said meat and the amount of clothes[11], below), let them bite off more than they can possibly chew! "Here comes the airplane!"
Footnote
[1] Meaning the Galactic Federation from Metroid (1986), a structure reflected in neoliberal media (videogames, from Pong [1972] onwards; re: "Modularity and Class," 2024). Reactionary or moderate, centrist or fascist, the state must create enemies to fear and destroy while abusing flexible double standards, onstage and off; i.e., amid equally plastic persecution language assigning in-group and out-group status to uphold the status quo's built-in, cops/victims inequality. It's neo-conservative, creating whatever monsters and cops it needs, including whores policing whores, in Metroidvania: good whore, bad whore; Samus, Mother Brain; survival sex worker, bourgeois cocotte.
[2] With CIA operatives in Vietnam commonly described as "advisors" and military operatives in other wars called "contractors." The privatization of war has medieval roots, the re-liberalizing of the market, under neoliberalism (and its cryptonymic power fantasies), steadily deregulating a push towards hauntologies dialing back worker rights: Samus' power is canonically false. We must reclaim said power by subverting its theft, "on the Aegis."
[3] No oubliette can hold secrets forever (essentially leaking them like hysterical "vapors" and toxic waste, once the seals fail; re: "Toxic Schlock Syndrome," 2025), and dead whores do tell tales; re (from Volume One):
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, 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 (re: Jameson). In other words, the pedagogy of the oppressed faces its classic foil: tone-policing (source: "Healing from Rape," 2024).
What applies to Jameson applies to any moderate, including Smith!
[4] Developing Communism requires using pre-capitalist ideas to push towards post-scarcity and horizontal (stateless, classless, moneyless) positions of power—the Wisdom of the Ancients a thing to recultivate by workers punching up by subverting the very taboos Smith discards with prejudice. Taboos aren't, unto themselves, harmful insofar as we must use them to reclaim our humanity along the same us-versus-them dialogs. Whores are monsters; proletarian whores, doubly so.
[5] This feels exclusionary and redundant; i.e., as prostitutes are workers and sex work is work.
[6] E.g., Male whores from non-Western countries; re (from Volume Three):
(exhibit 87e1: Left: source and model: Glasses GF; right, model: Glasses GF. In Gothic, whores are monsters. Catherine Mackinnon writes, "Sexual objectification is the primary process of the subjection of women. It unites act with word, construction with expression, perception with enforcement, myth with reality. Man fucks woman; subject verb object." However, in "A Gender Analysis of Global Sex Work" from Selling Sex in the City: A Global History of Prostitution, 1600s-2000s, Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk argues, "While most of the chapters do not provide much information about male or transgender/transvestite sex work (and in most historical [legal] contexts prostitution has been defined as "female"), some countries such as China and the Ottoman Empire had a rich tradition of prostitution by men or boys."
In other words, much of sex work is historically AFAB since ancient times but includes AMABs from as far back who are treated in a traditionally feminine sense under the current colonial model [whose exploitation under Capitalism we will examine in Chapter Three when we cover discrimination against femboys, "traps" and twinks in the "Patriarchal Hatred Against Transgender Persons, Intersexuality and Drag" section]. Regardless of sex or gender, all sex workers are heteronormatively slighted to varying degrees. Among them, men expect women [or beings forced to identify and perform as women] to labor in various ways that appeal to cis-het men as the universal clientele under Capitalism. These expectations objectify women for said gaze, but also treat them like disposable garbage (source: "Selling Sex, SWERFs and Un(der)paid Sex Work," 2025).
[7] Re: The non-white body explored in ways pornographic stereotypes having their own racialized flavor (which you can't very well explore with your clothes on).
[8] Meaning "treasure," from Māori; e.g., Dr. Huhana Hickey's pledge: "This Matariki, Dr. Huhana Hickey is calling for a return to pre-colonial understandings of disability - where people are seen as taonga. Her vision for the future is one of growth, advocacy, and healing, where every whānau member is valued" (source).
[9] Re (from Volume Two):
Capitalism must be escaped from within, but also with the help of those who inspire us […] "Escape," for workers, isn't to bury our heads in the sand, then, but enter authored sites of paradox/dens of confusion (the infernal concentric pattern) to play with cryptonymy as deliberately leading to healing of the home as sick with Capitalism. […] To that, sometimes the quickest path to "escape" (development) the maze isn't a straight line, but an ergodic, non-linear one that eventually (over many lifetimes and lives) leads to the exit (a condition of systemic healing inside the home) as stuck within the maze: something to renovate and allude to better and better versions thereof, not destroy or banish like a nightmare (source: "Out of This World, part two," 2024).
[10] E.g., the porn trope of needing one's "sofa moved." Monsters are a similar kind of code, of which there's endless variation (and social cues) to convey whenever we need.
[11] With such clothes classically being chosen by men; re: "Borrowed Robes: The Role of 'Chosen' Clothing — Part 1: Female Videogame Characters" (2021). But, as Smith shows, this same wardrobe policing operates as much through bias towards whores; i.e., as (sex) objects of academic study. For theatre to work as we need, we can't tie our hands behind our backs like Smith does. Public nudism has value, including monstrous-feminine forms; re: cops and robbers, Amazons and gorgons.
About the Author
Persephone van der Waard is the author of the multi-volume, non-profit book series, Sex Positivity—its art director, sole invigilator, illustrator and primary editor (the other co-writer/co-editor being Bay Ryan). Persephone has her independent PhD in Gothic poetics and ludo-Gothic BDSM (focusing partially on Metroidvania), and is a MtF trans woman, anti-fascist, atheist/Satanist, poly/pan kinkster, erotic artist/pornographer and anarcho-Communist with two partners. Including multiple playmates/friends and collaborators, Persephone and her many muses work/play together on Sex Positivity and on her artwork at large as a sex-positive force. That being said, she still occasionally writes reviews, Gothic analyses, and interviews for fun on her old blog (and makes YouTube videos talking about politics). Any money Persephone earns through commissions or donations goes towards helping sex workers through the Sex Positivity project; i.e., by paying costs and funding shoots, therefore raising awareness. She takes payment on PayPal, Patreon, and CashApp, etc; all links are available on her Linktr.ee. Every bit helps!
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