#tacticalfrivolity—namely
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vanderwaardart.bsky.social
The latest essay of mine on #statevampirism, this one offers an antidote— #TacticalFrivolity (namely #frogs and sex workers combating #racism, #fatphobia, and other bigotries!

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#SexWorkIsWork #fascism
"They're Making the Frogs Gay!"; or, a Sex Worker's Musings on Tactical Frivolity to Combat Racism (and Other Bigotries) February 15th, 2026 This essay tackles tactical frivolity through costumed performance: frogs and similar clowns' role, fighting state abuse; e.g., fatphobia, racism, animal cruelty, whorephobia and police brutality (my emphasis being sex work/unpaid labor—achieving intersectional consciousness and solidarity [awareness and teamwork] during ludo-Gothic BDSM, Gothic maturity and ass war all having the whore's revenge[1]). "Like acid and oil on a madman's face, His reason tends to fly away" (Blue Öyster Cult's "Astronomy," 1974), leaving onlookers not in the know a bit perplexed. Wherefore art thou, frog? And what is tactical frivolity whenever one "feels froggy"? source: https://nicksmovieinsights.com/2026/02/theyre-making-the-frogs-gay-or-a-sex-workers-musings-on-tactical-frivolity-to-combat-racism-and-other-bigotries.html "Oh? You're approaching me?" A frog chad vs the virgin Nazis. source, Christie Thompson's "The ICE Protest Frogs Have a Long History of 'Tactical Frivolity' Behind Them" (2025): https://www.themarshallproject.org/2025/10/22/trump-ice-portland-no-kings-protest The frog suit from SMB3 (1990): perched on a platform, ready to pounce into a gentle blue sky filled with coins. Me holding a bullfrog while living in Florida, in 2020. I called him Chuck.
February 15, 2026 at 8:37 PM
vanderwaardart.bsky.social
Updated the essay to include some extra ideas on #tacticalfrivolity—namely #monster-fucking of various kinds, including whores embodying nature as #monstrous-feminine, in that respect (e.g., Amazons):

nicksmovieinsights.com/2026/02/they...

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#SexWorkIsWork #AbloishICE
In short, we're all frogs in our own way—soft, squish, and alienized (of any color, not just green): (exhibit 0: Artist, top-far-left: Sinead Rhiannon; top-left: Nerdy Nami; top-right: Puppy Bat; top-far-right: Angel Witch; bottom-left: Alliesha Bay [alongside emiboz and source]; bottom-right: Jael. The Gorgon, as whore seeking revenge through liberation, is a fat-and-hairy source of envy among the ruling class pimping nature; i.e., monstrous-feminine idols [of any race or gender] showing the human condition as abject; re: inherently "of nature" as such, and ones reclaiming our various tissues—our terrifying [to the elite] skin, hair, meat, fat, and bodily functions—by fetishizing ourselves in reverse-gargoyle, alien acts of criminal, terrifying reclamation, "profaning the church" in duality. The state hates what they feed on; re: workers/nature, which we deny our pimps/shame them behind the usual cryptonymic buffers, mid-abjection. To control the mirror is to control the body upon its canvas, thus direct state toxicity away from us and towards our enemies. Like the chimera, we combine this-or-that to confuse and overwhelm our prey—reversing predator/prey through abject mechanisms of fear and fascination, of power and death, of worship in and from "the devil's workshop" having Amazonian/Gorgon-esque qualities [as terror weapons tied to the land, under colonial models; e.g., Amazons and anal sex; re: "Our Sweet Revenge," 2025]: We do so through fakery but also descriptive sexuality and cultural appreciation, Medusa the ghost of the counterfeit as both invented and evocation of rape: as a buried, sex-object reality under Western hegemons; re: the original slave/rape victim [unpaid labor] under the world's oldest profession, therefore struggle: pimps and whores. To breathe life into that is to weaken the West's hold on life, thus hasten its demise... To it, those in harmony with nature are "frivolous like the frog"; they challenge the state in opposition, year-round, and generally from scapegoat positions of distress, hysteria (or whatever it's called; e.g., Wandering Womb, bicycle face, etc) and disadvantage during calculated risk: a campy subversion of the usual dynamics of sex, terror and violence, during ludo-Gothic BDSM framing women (or those treated as women) paradoxically as virgin/whore monsters—all to give the colonized some sense of control, therefore advantage during the usual paradoxical exposure "hugging the alien," mid-Amazonomachia. Matter shapes consciousness, whatever bugbears the Protestant ethic rarefies an extension of the usual abject contradictions; i.e., the sex is forbidden to the point of death/urban legend (e.g., Pillowpants from Clerks 2, 2006), but also who you have it with and where (outside the bedroom) as demanding postpunk, "danger disco" forms of false protest that conceal the fun being had: "My precious modesty! I'm totally being ravished, right now!" Proximity with "evil" = rape/death tied to puritanical modesty arguments scared to death of sex, which capital pimps out through legends of itself: a cautionary tale about interracial sex and intermarriage, one that Gothic historically plays with; re: swamp bunnies (or frog ladies), symbiotically "cozy" alongside those who seem scary but actually protect someone small and prey-like from harm (of any social-material configuration versus nuclear-home-as-false; re: the pauper and the prince, the lady and the tramp). (artist: Soli; cited: "Our Sweet Revenge") I digress. Power and its familiar/foreign arrangement takes many forms, the Gothic heroine "loving the demon" from Radcliffe to us (re: Cynthia Wolff, 1979). I digress. Power and its familiar/foreign arrangement takes many forms, the Gothic heroine "loving the demon" from Radcliffe to us (re: Cynthia Wolff, 1979). "Her tits were there" marries bizarrely to "kissing frogs" to counteract state ideas about sex—namely that sex for anything other than sexual reproductive "is gay," whorish, dark, abject (and which Gothic authors [novelists or otherwise] captivate a broader imagination through captive and rape fantasies, during courtly love as forbidden love—one where kept women mysteriously fantasize being with "dangerous/supernatural" people versus their so-called "protectors," at home; re: "I'll See You in Hell"). So is monster-fucking a common act of tactical frivolity under capital's harvests (and one I've illustrated too many times to count; e.g., Cuwu and Jericho, below); i.e., disguised as "holidays" (masking the naturalized, orderly butchery of the planet under Cartesian dualism, worldwide). To that, Friday the 13th (when the writing process for "Frogs Gay!" began) is just another day for camping the canon, thus unmasking slashers (classically bandits posturing as undead to rob the locals blind; re: Radcliffe): as part of a larger cycle, wearing some-such Halloween costume to both cryptonymically buttress, buffer and broadcast whatever workers need, mid-masque: (exhibit 1: Model and artist, left: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard; right: Jericho and Persephone van der Waard.) Whatever works, monsters a classic, liminal means of code to spread the word as clowns do, ergo whores of any costume their heart desires (frogs a Frankenstein green to chimerically purport upon ourselves, turning stigma, envy, humiliation and shame, etc, into power): nature as food punching back/up, refusing to obey "on the Aegis" but occupying positions where obedience is expected/demanded by state powers (men kicking dogs also squashing toads). So much of power is unspoken, instead conveyed allegorically through Gothic abstraction-as-code... and, by extension, the natural world; i.e., as something the state invades, and which workers (female or not) resist through the dialectic of the alien (abjection), mid-invasion: "Gothic considers the preface that alien invasion is already complete, something to be resisted within the home as alien, impostor, infiltrator. The process goes both ways, sharing a larger space of concealment, confusion and disorder" (source YouTube community post, Persephone van der Waard: February 12th, 2026, in response to Andrewsim's "How to Resist an Alien Invasion," 2026). Whores write among nature as already colonized, thus demonized in ways workers reject or reclaim, "on the Aegis" as categorically denied to marginalized peoples by status-quo ones; i.e., whores silenced by pimps within a larger hegemon, one where victims of rape raise their own circus-in-a-circus: to paradoxically "blow the whistle" when throttled, cryptonymically/-mimetically passing on realities' unspoken horrors (the frivolity of rape play often solemn, below). (source: "Healing from Rape") To quote Austen: "Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything" (source: Persuasion, 1817). Follow that up with Said's Culture and Imperialism (1993), itself going back and forth in a larger dialog I responded to, in a larger spectral, collocative chain (which Communism essentially is, before and after Marx): Even with Said debating Austen's "ghost" minus Gothic poetics, there's considerable merit to arguing with spectres and the unspoken (re: Castricano's cryptomimesis, or "writing with ghosts," which I expanded to "writing with monsters"). Indeed, doing so is a time-honored activity that largely makes up what the Gothic is...
February 16, 2026 at 6:51 PM