the thoughts sian had the other day about bataille have continued to resonate, and sian has told a bunch of people about acéphale now, and blown a fair few minds with it. sian supposes it is time to have a proper think about this. don’t worry. if you are here for the photos, that is just fine.
part 1. mimesis and hypocrisy
when sian started playing with dark kink in secondlife, she quickly realised that not everyone approached the kink like she did.
sian wanted to explore her more problematic sci-fi fantasies with an appreciation of their wrongness, their basic psychopathy. part of the thrill with the roleplay lore that sian developed – a corporation that treats human minds and bodies as disposable assets and perverts sexuality into a tool of capitalist productivity – is their dystopic evil, the understanding that if sian were to see these things done in real life she would be appalled and repelled. but there is a thrill to it; it is the same frisson sian gets from horror in books and cinema[1]. We engage in a catharsis in the exact aristotelian sense:
“…the imitation (mimesis) of a serious and complete action, which has a magnitude… through fear and pity it brings about the purge (catharsis) of emotions like it.”[2]
people looking in from the outside often find kinks like this difficult to understand in exactly the way that they don’t understand why people like horror movies (or perhaps more appositely horror role-playing games): to wit, it is because they think that the sort of people who find excitement and eroticism in horror are actually just wishing they could do this stuff for realsies, and actually would, if it weren’t for physical impossibility, money, and, you know, getting caught and going to jail.
it is easy to just dismiss this as stupid. but when it comes to dark kinks in secondlife, there is the unfortunate fact, however, that there really is a sizeable minority of people who do actually wish they could do it for realsies, if it weren’t for all that getting caught stuff. they exist. and some of them are pretty easy to spot if you have been around long enough. the old y.m.o. group was pretty much made of them, for example,[3] but many of the venues that sian hung out in had a fair few of them.
and then there are the ones who are sort of weirdly illiterate about it, like the one technofetishist sian 1.0 knew who rated the quality of science fictional media which featured female cyborgs or gynoids according to a strict numerical quantum of the things they could masturbate over appearing in the script, and considered such media bad if the fembots didn’t malfunction/ have visible wires and circuits/ get turned on or off. as someone who has literally made a living getting people to understand media, sian found this actively offensive.
but hang on, isn’t that a trap? isn’t sian really just finding excuses to justify these fantasies by going, “i am a good fetishist, not like those ones, the icky, gross, stupid ones, because i clutch my metaphorical pearls about morality and justify it with quotes from j.g. ballard and aristotle and georges bataille, as if somehow i’m not getting my rocks off too just as messily”?
isn’t sian just being a hypocrite?
part 2. transvillainy
the spoiler ending is that sian found a way through without (she hopes) being a hypocrite, but she spent many years dealing with a lot of shame attached to all this. this was because, ironically, she suspected for a long time that maybe the people who were doing it properly were in fact those people who wanted to do the bad things for realsies, and every time she was reminded they existed, it made her feel a bit sick in her mouth. she’d have a go at playing the kink, and then she would meet one person who was actually there for the evil, and she would remember why she was ashamed, and then she’d skip out.
saying “rinse and repeat” seems weird when you’re as bald as sian is, but you get the idea.
let’s be honest, the things you are hot for are not always the things you are going to tell your human resources director about, right? there are appropriate venues. but actually having a place where you can talk about it at all is huge.
and that’s happened. it’s a thing. sian found a community, a vigilant one. sian’s rl lovers know about this stuff and talk about it intelligently and that makes a great deal of difference.
obviously, since 2018, secondlife for sian has been rlv turtles all the way down. recently the cyberdoll hive queen persona has settled into a fully realised villain era, where sian plays deeply into being both sub and domme, queen doll, mistress of the hive mind, programmed with the dominamatrix.[4] sian’s persona as icy, merciless mind-wiped mind controller is perhaps obviously not the whole story, but the idea of her as a tragic figure, a product of trauma, only adds to the power of it for her and her player. look, it isn’t new or special: even darth interfacing vader, modern media’s most basic villain, is compelling because he was an abused kid who was groomed by a predator and driven into villainy by trauma.
but then, that is pretty much an essential factor of being trans in this society, isn’t it? we – the trans people – get two main stories, the ones where we get to be deep in gender euphoria, where we live in worlds where everything is fine for us, and the ones where we use metaphor and pain to grapple with our gender identity being the vector that costs us everything we have and burns our lives to ashes.
we are often utterly terrified to play out the queer villain arc, because in media queerness and villainy are defaulted, and are often intertwined in terrible ways – see the book version of baron harkonnen, for example, who’s a bad guy and therefore gay and therefore a paedophile. that isn’t one of our monsters, that is one of theirs. queer people have to be given the agency to be the monsters they want to be, if they want to be. we don’t get to be liberated unless we get to be bad on our terms. and villainy is always gendered.
let’s say that again.
villainy is always gendered.
cis/het people often don’t notice that because most of them in sian’s experience don’t think of gender as a thing they’re given or have, they think of it as a thing they are. but villains are made of their type by the gender the fiction assigns to them. a baroness harkonnen for instance might be a predatory lesbian like the ones in any number of 70s hammer movies, but she wouldn’t be a paedophile, she would be vampiric. if darth vader was a woman, her plastic suit would be very different, and her abuse, grooming and trauma would take a different narrative route.
a philosophy of queer villainy, of queer evil as a discrete thing defined by queer people themselves, is essential. we have always been the villains, but it is always on their terms. we need to make ourselves our own villains. that is the thing we need to reclaim. that is the thing we need to rewrite. we must control the narrative.
and why not then make the narrative about control?
part 3. connection through ambivalent horror
sian’s “winston smith, only super hot, trans and with latex and fucking” vibe freaks as many people out as it arouses, even people in secondlife’s super niche kinky scene.
many people don’t want tragedy and trauma in their kink. it turns out though that a lot of trans people do, though. nearly everyone sian plays with is some sort of genderqueer. trans people understand tragedy, and they either run a mile from it or vibe with it on a deep level.
a lot of people find sian’s “ambivalent horror in a pretty nice avatar” thing compelling. sian often used to find it genuinely baffling that people used to – and still do – zero right in on her in fetish venues and literally beg to be dominated.
but even people who don’t believe in nuance, like little mx. wanks-over-girls-with-on-switches for example, respond to nuance. sian’s stalker of old wanted someone with depth in her collection of ruined slaves. sian just about got out of that situation with her soul intact. there are tells, but sometimes you have to learn what they are. that was not the optimal way for sian to learn that lesson.
this isn’t a brag. because it goes both ways. the skill of spotting the people who get it – and it’s a learned skill – took sian a while to even realise it existed, let alone gain competency in it.
and here is the thing, we’re back with acéphale, the cult where everyone is the victim and no one is the executioner. we are that thing exactly, because it is the queerest, kinkiest thing ever.
exploring this awkwardly sexual, tyrannical horror allows us to find love in the cracks of it, affection in the spaces. the crushing dystopia we create reminds us of the one in the real world we have to live through. we play out the destruction of hope and find hope in it. we pretend that we’ve programmed each other’s brains to obey, when really all we want is to be serene and capable and productive and the best girlfriends we can be.
by making the hive queen the permadoll, who is locked down so much harder than any of her subjects, creates a weird, asymmetrical solidarity. we are in this together. we have a faction. and we don’t need to doubt it.
we are moving from making this guilty and weird into something that is affirming for life and relationships. we are bringing the wholesome out of the horrific.
surely that is worth something.
________
footnotes (yes, again. don’t say a word)
[1] few things are more explicit tells of a person’s internal scars than their favourite horror media. to give you some idea of what we are looking at here, here are sian’s five favourite horror movies: possession (andrzej zuławski, 1981); crash (david cronenberg, 1996); us (jordan peele, 2019); may (lucky mckee, 2002); titane (julia ducournau, 2021). the fact they all deal with eroticism or trauma (or in a couple of cases both) probably should not be lost on you.
[2] aristotle, poetics vi. 1449b. that’s right, motherinterfacers, we just quoted aristotle in a secondlife blog about bdsm. overthinking? you don’t even know the half of it.
[3] sian thinks y.m.o. is defunct, or really hopes it is, but can’t tell because she was banned from their sim years ago as (hilariously) a poacher. predators always tell on themselves if you know how to listen.
[4] no one else finds the word “dominamatrix” nearly as funny as sian does. it is the world’s most niche dad joke.
featured skin and makeup:
• miamai malefica eyes and eyeshadows
• shiny stuffs april showers lips
• wow skins mel skin (velour icy)
• -vortex- lashes 2.0
featured clothing:
• phy.ka queen latex gloves
• :::sole::: girov – drive connection cable (vandalised); sa – headset; sa – p-guard lilith; sa – proof
• azoury le maitre en toutes choses boots
• midwest my pride pin – trans (pride at home gift 06/24)
• r2 r2lx cyber pasties (access gift 06/24); r2lx syungyou bodysuit
commentary on the avatar stuff (don’t get used to it):
• you cannot possibly comprehend how pleased sian was to discover that miamai is still going. miamai was one of the very first stores that sian bought from, three main accounts and 15 years ago, and back in 2013 sian 1.0 helped organise a concept fashion show for that shop and made a little doll avatar for the event. so learning that monica outlander, who was always great at avatar system layers, seems to be thriving in the bom economy is lovely.
• the skin is another exquisite example sian got from wow skins in the weekend sales last week – L$99 in this economy for a full skin set of this quality is not a thing you can pass up. this saturday it will be a different skin, but it will probably be equally fantastic. sian hasn’t settled on a new forever skin yet, but the wow skins ones are very much contenders.
• that cable was really tricky to style. it came from the days when gachas weren’t illegal. despite being the ultrarare prize, and now only available in a prohibitively expensive fatpack, sian customised it with something appropriately dystopian, because what’s the point of having it in the inventory if you can’t style it, right? also – one of the lovely things about sole’s stuff is that – like r2 actually – they pretty much always have their glowy text have its own texture so it’s really easy to hack if you are so inclined. sian will always take a mod thing over a no mod. anyway, sian decided to rock it because sian wanted to make a point about connection. because it has a connector on the end. and it is a connection. because it connects, you see. got that? oh, please yourself.
• mirrors. firestorm has caught up with the rest of sl and now you can have mirrors. real ones. so you can see into a mirror, darkly.
• shape tweak! that is all.
