The Erotic Machine: Desire, Autonomy, and Feminist Reprogramming

 Women are taught, very early, that desire is something that happens to us, not something we generate. We are expected to be the stage, not the actor; the landscape, not the storm. Art history prefers women as allegories of desire, never as its engineers.

Yet the truth is far more interesting:
women are machines of desire — intricate, volatile, recursive, sovereign.

Not machines in the patriarchal sense (cold, efficient, programmable), but machines in the mythological sense: creations of circuitry and intuition, marked by pleasure, instinct, history, trauma, power, metamorphosis. Machines that rewrite themselves.

For years I sensed this intuitively while writing, while constructing performance personas, while building erotic visual archives that slipped between seduction and subversion. But it was only later — through digital art, feminist theory, and the disobedient erotics of punk — that the idea matured into a framework: the erotic machine as feminist methodology.

The erotic machine is not a literal device.
It is an aesthetic principle.
A philosophical engine.
A refusal to let desire be domesticated.

Patriarchal cultures treat female desire as either dangerous or decorative. A thing to suppress or a thing to sell. Both outcomes remove agency. But when the erotic is reclaimed by the woman herself — as creator, curator, and conductor — it becomes a form of intellectual and political power.

Audre Lorde wrote that the erotic is a source of deep knowledge.
Punk taught me that the erotic is also a source of havoc.
Digital art shows me that the erotic is programmable, glitchable, corruptible — and therefore hackable.

In my creative practice, the erotic machine appears in many shapes:

1. The erotic as glitch
When I distort digital images — bodies multiplied, colours bleeding, textures corrupted — desire becomes unruly. It escapes categorisation. It refuses the tidy erotics of commercial culture. A body that glitches cannot be easily consumed.

2. The erotic as persona
Pasha du Valentine and the Countess both emerged from erotic excess. These personas allowed desire to become theatrical, intellectual, excessive, and critical. They were not objects of desire; they were agents manufacturing desire as a political gesture.

3. The erotic as archive
Erotic art history has always been political. But feminist erotic archives do something additional: they reclaim pleasure as authorship. They reframe sexuality as knowledge, not as spectacle.

4. The erotic as refusal
Desire that refuses to perform according to patriarchal scripts becomes inherently radical. When women depict desire in ways that are messy, strange, self-focused, or unprofitable, they disrupt the entire economic infrastructure of femininity.

The erotic machine is not cute.
It does not coo.
It does not whisper.
It hums.
It overheats.
It buzzes like a wasp trapped behind a mirror.

It is a structure of agency: a self-assembled mechanism capable of generating meaning and pleasure without permission. And like all machines, it can malfunction — but in feminist art, malfunction is productive. Error becomes language. Overload becomes revelation. Noise becomes a kind of orgasmic theory.

What excites me most is that the erotic machine is incompatible with patriarchy. Patriarchy depends on the illusion that women cannot author their own desire. Once that illusion collapses, the whole architecture rattles. Feminist erotic art rattles it deliberately.

Sometimes gently.
Sometimes violently.
Sometimes with a sly grin.
Sometimes with a glitched pixel that refuses to be smoothed.

My relationship with the erotic is as much intellectual as it is visceral. It is a lens, a toolkit, a source of research. It influences the way I film bodies, paint textures, write fiction, design personas, and craft moving-image works that hover between seduction and critique.

To work with the erotic as a feminist artist is not to be provocative for its own sake.
It is to reclaim the circuitry of feeling.
To reprogram the software of the gaze.
To design your own architecture of pleasure.

The erotic machine is not a fantasy of futurism.
It is already here.
It is the woman who writes her own desire into being, again and again, in every medium available.

And once activated, it cannot be shut down.

ESSAY 4 — Beauty as Mutiny: Subversion, Erotics, and the Refusal to Behave

 Beauty, for women, has never been neutral. It is a currency, a weapon, a cage, a performance, a threat, a promise, a provocation, a negotiation, and occasionally — if we’re lucky — a pleasure. But in the history of art, beauty is most often a leash.

The feminine body appears in Western art as an object of interpretation rather than a force of creation: gazed upon, worshipped, dissected, idealised, punished. Beauty became a disciplinary mechanism; even now, women are expected to participate in their own aesthetic containment.

But what happens when the artist refuses to behave?

This question has been at the core of my work for decades. In my early punk years, beauty was something to be rejected outright — a trap, a patriarchal choreography designed to minimise autonomy. I shaved things, ripped things, painted things that were not meant to be painted. My femininity was not something to be displayed; it was something to deconstruct.

Later came a more interesting realisation: beauty can be reclaimed, re-engineered, reloaded. It can be a feminist mutiny.

A beauty that bites back.
A beauty that exposes the violence of the gaze.
A beauty that seduces while dismantling the structures that define seduction.

The Countess persona was born from this revelation. She was luscious, glamorous, sensuous — but with her own agenda. An erotic force that didn’t aim to please but to unsettle. To take up space in a way that mocked the architecture of patriarchal desire. Where traditional beauty whispers, the Countess snarled.

It wasn’t about prettiness; it was about power theatre.

In the digital era, beauty morphs again. Filtered faces, commodified bodies, algorithmic desirability — all of it intensifies the pressure on women to perform femininity within pre-sanctioned aesthetic boundaries.

But digital beauty can also glitch.
And glitching is feminist.

When I distort images, blur edges, corrupt pixels, or fracture skin tones and textures, I’m not “breaking” beauty — I’m breaking its control mechanisms. Digital distortion reveals how artificial the whole system was to begin with. A glitch is a confession: beauty was never stable, neutral, or pure.

It was always constructed.

And if beauty is constructed, it can be reconstructed — in the shape of rebellion, rather than obedience.

Erotic art history is one of my current focuses for this reason. The erotic has always been weaponised against women: censored, sensationalised, appropriated, punished. But feminist erotic art uses desire as a scalpel, a poem, a blade. It critiques while it arouses; it confronts while it seduces. The erotics of power, the erotics of refusal, the erotics of noncompliance — these are rich terrains for artistic interventions.

Beauty becomes mutiny when it refuses to participate in its own domestication.

Beauty becomes feminist when it becomes dangerous.

Beauty becomes art when it stops behaving.

What interests me most now is how beauty operates in the spaces between categories — between polished and broken, seductive and subversive, delicate and defiant. In these hybrid zones, the feminine body becomes a site of political imagination rather than patriarchal extraction.

Beauty, when wielded by the artist rather than the gaze, becomes a form of insurgency: a shimmering, chaotic, deliciously disruptive force capable of rewriting the conditions under which women appear in the world.

And perhaps that is the most radical beauty of all.