Emma’s in a part of town
where she doesn’t recognize the streets
named for famous native sons
and out of every crevice comes creeping
a threat in her direction
Lucy’s outside her home
heading towards her corner store
she stays on well-travelled paths
and is always making sure
that she doesn’t develop patterns
– Cowboy Junkies
Over the last month or so, while the world burned and my emotions went entirely haywire thanks to the painful process of nicotine withdrawal, I’ve been posting artwork on social media that eventually became the slightly menacing hearts series. Like most of my generative art series, I made the source code available on github, and released a curated set of pieces on my art website. In the past when releasing a series that I particularly like, I’ve written technical posts on this blog that show how the system is designed (examples here, here, and here). I thought about doing that again, but honestly I don’t think there’s much value to it this time because the implementation of the menacing hearts system isn’t that much different to the tutorial on iterated function systems that I wrote a few years ago. From a technical standpoint there’s really nothing new to say, and indeed this post does not contain any euqations or any code.
From an artistic perspective though, it seems to me that there is still something missing. For as long as I’ve been making generative art I’ve consistently talked about the fact that my creative process is driven by emotions. Here’s something I wrote back in 2021:
Most of the time the starting point for my art is an emotion. I might be angry or lonely or tired, or just in need of something to occupy my mind and distract me from something else. When I start implementing a new system it’s often (though not always) a modification of a previous one. In principle this modification process could go in any direction, but my aesthetic sensibilities depend a lot on my state of mind, and that imposes a bias. I tweak the code one way, and see what it produces. If I like it, I keep the change, if I don’t I reject it. It’s a lot like a Metropolis-Hastings sampler that way, but my mood strongly shapes the accept/reject decision, so the same starting point can lead to different outcomes.
As I wrap the slightly menacing hearts series up, it strikes me that this work has been one of the most deeply personal things I’ve ever done with my art. The emotions that drove this series are tied to trauma, and when I posted individual pieces to mastodon or bluesky I tended to provide captions or titles for the pieces. The captions were often sinister, but these do not appear in the gallery of images I released. That page is just 200 images displayed in a random order. The context has been stripped out, and the audience can’t see the progression over time as the series unfolded.
Maybe that doesn’t matter. Barthes wasn’t wrong when he wrote the death of the author. Yes, I created the pieces. And yes, my emotions and experiences shape how and why I did that. But those experiences aren’t dispositive when interpreting the artwork. I have an interpretation of my work. Others are free to perceive and interpret the same pieces in a different way.
Nevertheless, I’m still going to say something about what the art means to me. So… here goes.
Though it is primarily about art, this post talks openly about rape. There is quite a lot of misogyny and transphobia in the text, and references to homophobic hate crimes. It may not be an easy read.
I. Desire
The series started with a sense of joy and success. The mood partly captured my sense of accomplishment that I’d finally found a way to render the heart motif within this system in a way I found personally satisfying. It’s something I’d tried to do in two previous systems (here and here) but with less success than I would have liked. So I was cautiously hopeful when the sixth version of the code started producing pieces I liked. Not quite convinced it was going to work out, I posted this one to social media with the caption “maybe”:
Admittedly, my cautious optimism about the system wasn’t the only reason for picking this title. I hadn’t chosen the heart motif by accident, after all. I wrote this into the code because I was distracted thinking about love, sex, and men. The sexual undercurrent, which became darker and more overt later in the series, was there from the outset.
The next piece I shared was literally the next image that the system created. The maybe piece was generated using the sixth version of the system, and like most of my systems the only input argument is the RNG seed. maybe sets the seed to 1504, and the next piece something comes from seed 1505. I honestly don’t know if the pairing of titles was intentional, but it does occur to me that “maybe [this is] something…” speaks more directly to the feeling I had at the time:
Like maybe, there is something delicate about something, but this time there is more energy. The white in the centre of the heart feels like it’s glowing. It feels joyful to me, slightly dreamy. There is love in the art, and – not entirely coincidentally – I was thinking about a man, so when the next iteration of the code produced the image below, it’s hardly a surprise that the accompanying caption turned the subtext into the text. This one is he loves me, he loves me not:
I adore this piece. The balance between the orange tones and the blue tones appeals to me, and this was one of the first pieces that made me think about the structural relationship between the “glow” in these images and the boundary defined by the heart motif itself. The way the blue seems to grow outwards from the heart, but then cling to the vertical streaks that run through the piece feels very organic to me. It makes me happy every time I revisit it.
The piece that followed has a slightly different vibe. The red glow in this piece extends further than earlier ones, and the warmth of the red tones is a stark contrast against the dull flat grey background. So when I called it languid in the afterglow, yes, it was about sex. Or the bit after sex when you’re still happy and warm and safe even if the rest of the world is none of those things. The afterglow that never lasts as long as you want it to.
Sigh.
In any case, the next piece I shared on social media didn’t have an explicit title. The accompanying text wasn’t really intended to be a title. All I wrote was “this one has such a raw, exposed feel to me that fits my mood of late” and I later decided that raw, exposed made a good title for this one.
The mood is obvious, to me at least. Compared to previous pieces the heart is so much larger, giving this feeling like the viewer is zooming in. Juxtaposed with those pieces it feels like the audience is encroaching on the subject. It feels like an invasion of personal space, and the bright bursts feel too bright, too much, and to my mind this one marks the end of a “phase” within the series. It’s the point at which the soft, gentle feeling starts to go away. The love and warmth seems to be gone, stripped away leaving something else exposed. It feels uncomfortable.
II. Rage
In the days that followed, my mood declined. Partly it was a reaction to the state of the world, but it was partly caused by nicotine withdrawal (that comes up again later). In truth, I’d stopped smoking six months ago, but because I’d given myself permission to use nicotine gum as much as I needed to, I hadn’t actually made much progress on breaking the physiological addiction: all I’d been doing was getting the smoke out of my lungs and transferring the psychological cravings from the cigarettes to the gum. Worthy accomplishments, of course, but once I switched over to patches the amount of nicotine in my system started to plummet and withdrawal symptoms hit me really, really hard. I was tired all the time, I had trouble concentrating, and most of all I was having difficulty managing my emotions.
I felt angry, and I felt hopeless. When I shared this piece, I didn’t post it directly. I’d sent it to a friend of mine via chat and bitterly remarked to her that I was making my stupid art as if somehow it will make me feel better about fascism. I know, I know, I’m not supposed to feel like that about my art. People tell me over and over that art matters even more in dark times, and that the art I share helps them cope with the feeling of dread they feel when yet another horrible news story breaks. That’s lovely, but none of that helps me cope with my feelings of dread. The artist is somehow supposed to soothe others with her art, but she is not herself a beneficiary of the magic.
That bitterness is what came through when messaging my friend, and when I shared the piece on social media the thing I shared was a screenshot of my message to her and not the piece itself.
As far as I can tell, this was the first time I shared one of these pieces that obscured the heart motif. It’s there – every piece generated by these systems contains the heart motif in some sense – but the black smudges blot it out. I suppose the dark amorphous shape blocking out the sense of love that would otherwise be present is intended to represent the creeping fascism spreading across much of the western world? It’s not exactly a subtle message, really.
In any case, the visual style becomes even bleaker in the next piece, waving tiny rainbow flags as the gender traitors are herded toward the gallows. Again, the intention behind the caption wasn’t subtle. It speaks directly to my bitterness about people who think they are allies to the trans community, but who might as well be our enemies for all the good they do us. These are the people who wave the pride flag every Mardi Gras, happily tell us on social media that “love is love”, “trans women are women”, and “you are valid!” but remain deathly silent in the real world where our rights are being drastically eroded at a terrifying pace. And to be blunt about it, most cisgender progressives fall into this category.
Both of these pieces are angrier in their intention, and neither one is visually appealing in the same way that the earlier hearts pieces were. They mark a shift in tone, but – at least to me – the emotion involved isn’t really connected to the earlier pieces. Thematically, neither of these ties closely to the ideas around sex and love expressed earlier.
The next piece I shared, on the other hand…
This one hurt to post, and still hurts for me to look at. Visually, the red/green/black palette is intense but it’s dark. The black stain in the middle blots out most of the heart, and the streaks feel more like slashes and cuts tearing through the heart. The piece is striking, but it’s not pleasant to me.
I posted it with the caption her rapist got her pronouns right this time.
I am still not sure why I did that. It is, I’m sorry to say, autobiographical. It bitterly references something that happened. Why I chose this moment and this piece to pivot into a darker and more personal place, I don’t really know. But I did. Earlier in the series there was a sexual undertone that was joyful; now the art is speaking about the artist being raped.
The reference to pronouns in the title isn’t arbitrary either. One of the horrifying messages that trans women get sent by society is that we are “disposable women”. We aren’t “good women”, we’re the other kind. The ones that men are allowed to rape. More than that, we’re taught to perceive our own rape as gender affirming: a man has validated my gender by treating me like a woman. Being raped is supposed to be a compliment, of sorts: it’s proof that I’m enough of a woman that men want to rape me too. These messages reverberate through my head every time I revisit my experiences with rape, and the rage I feel when these thoughts intrude upon my life is overwhelming.
With that as context, the superficial lightness of the next piece is a little jarring:
It was never posted with an explicit title, and at the time I posted it I was focused on a specific art criticism that I frequently encounter on social media, namely that generative art can never really be art. Generative art is machine generated, so it cannot capture true human feeling. It is soulless and empty. I don’t agree with that claim, and when I posted this piece I did so with this as the alt text:
sigh. okay look, this is another one of the “slightly menacing hearts” pieces i’ve been posting lately. and yes, it is generative art, the saccharine and bland stuff everyone on here loves to hate and deride. of course, the system is written entirely by myself in R and C++ as usual, and is not “trained” on anything at all, much less the work of other artists. because my work is of course utter garbage, the colour palette is very bright bloody pink and deep green, watermelon colours. see, red heart against green? so pretty, so nice… except the red heart has black rot in the middle, the colour is leeching into the surrounding canvas, and there are ugly slash marks marring the nice pretty background, as if something had corrupted something that should have been beautiful. perhaps the artist, quite publicly a repeated survivor of rape, is expressing a very human emotion through her machine-generated work? nope, can’t be that, because all generative art is inherently soulless, lacking in artistic value, and we should never draw distinctions of any kind when making broad sweeping generalisations is so easy?
So yes, rape is present in this piece, just not as overtly as it was in the previous one. In the end I decided to call it saccharine, sweet, and devoid of value with two different intended interpretations: on the one hand it’s a reference to what people wrongly think generative art is, but on the other hand it’s also a nasty reference to how I’m supposed to think of myself as a trans woman. I am supposed to be sweet and nice just like one of the “good women”, but nevertheless I am one of the “disposable women”. In the language of the Madonna/Whore complex, trans women are always the whore. We exist to be sexually degraded, and can never aspire to be high-status women.
III. Shame
Given where my mood had taken me, is it any real surprise that feelings of shame and humiliation start to appear in the series? I posted these two pieces together with the caption degradation:
I suppose the intention here was to contrast the different feel that inverting the palette has in this version of the system. The white pieces on black background tended to be delicate and lovely, the black pieces on white background have a bleaker, coarser feel. It’s not an inherent feature of white/black palettes of course, just something that emerged from the dynamics of this particular system variant, and it felt striking to me.
Why call the joint piece degradation though? Only one of the two pieces feels degraded. My introspection fails me a little here: maybe it’s a before the rape / after the rape distinction, or maybe it’s another reference to the Madonna/Whore dynamic. I don’t know for sure. One way or another though, the degradation referred to is sexual degradation. It references the way men usually treat me during sex, and how that treatment has trained me to confuse abuse with affection, and conflate degradation with desire. Men have taught me many lessons in life, but their primary teaching has been this one: I am weak, I am worthless, and I am shameful. Yes, this is unfair. In a moral universe shame and self-loathing should attach to abusers and rapists; but we don’t live in that universe. In real life shame is for the victims.
The next shared piece was this one:
Once again, the title provides interpretation: wants me to tell him something pretty. In this the heart motif is completely obscured, and focus is drawn instead on the black shapes blotting it out against the eerie red background. Even at a visual level this piece abandons the pretense that any of this is gentle or kind or loving. In artistic terms it is a deliberate repudiation of the same thing that saccharine, sweet, and devoid of value criticises. Art isn’t always nice. It isn’t always pretty. And the real world stories behind the art aren’t always pretty either. On another level, the “something pretty” in the title partly references the expectation men have that women should make ourselves pretty for them, and the piece rejects that too.
Finally, the specific choice of phrasing is a deliberate cultural reference. It is the final line spoken in the TV series Deadwood, delivered by Al Swearengen as he cleans up the blood of yet another murder, sourly commenting on the fact that even after all the horrors, some people never get it. They still want to be told a pretty story.
Next came the triptych, her presence is a blight on the natural order:
Yet again, there is little subtlety here. One of these pieces is not like the others. Two of them are beautiful, delicate, lovely pieces to be cherished and admired. The third is a degraded, bleak, ugly thing. Guess which one is me? Guess which one is the trans woman, the one whose mere presence is declared a blight upon the natural order? If images could feel shame, we all know which one should feel that shame.
IV. Dread
At this point I am going to slightly reorder the sequence of pieces from how I shared them on social media. There are two pieces I posted with captions that refer directly to the physiological experiences I was having at the time, unmedicated anxiety and nicotine withdrawal. I didn’t post them explicitly as a pair, but it feels like they go naturally together:
From a purely visual perspective I love both of these. The glowing red background to unmedicated anxiety and the softer orange lighting in nicotine withdrawal give the black structural features in both pieces a slightly haunted feel, which is very much how I was feeling at the time. My body was not in a great place, and my mood was both fickle and awful. I would lie in bed in a state of exhaustion that wrapped my brain in a confused fog, only to have this feeling punctured by occasional spikes of anxiety and dread which certainly made me alert, but rarely made me feel functional.
At around the same time I also posted this one:
The title is mostly intended literally: the brown shading in the piece feels like corrosion to me. I suppose it should be a little redder to look like rusty iron, but as an artistic choice I rarely exercise control over my pieces at that low a level. I write down the rules for the art system, and curate the pieces it creates, but I don’t directly intervene to modify them.
At the time I posted it I honestly don’t think I had a specific authorial intent, but in hindsight it seems to work nicely with unmedicated anxiety and nicotine withdrawal. Internally I felt like my body was corroded due to the withdrawal symptoms, and of course the sense of being corrupted is tightly intertwined with my emotions about being a trans woman and a rape survivor. It fits.
Then there is this one. Visually it is quite stark, and flatter than some of the others. The orange and white feels like a sunset to me, with the long dark shadows that grow at the end of day.
I posted this with the caption dreamless eternal night awaited her, for she had no soul and had not been able to win one, a quote from The Little Mermaid. After selling her voice to the sea witch to alter her body, the mute little mermaid lives in constant pain but dances for her prince in the hope that he will marry her and provide her the soul that she was born without. He doesn’t, of course. She isn’t a real woman, she isn’t important enough to marry a prince, so the reward for her suffering is death. Though she acts the part of the madonna, the little mermaid is a whore.
For obvious reasons, quite a few trans women empathise deeply with the little mermaid. We know only too well how painful the transformation is, and that the pain persists long after the transition itself. We too know what it means to be seen to be soulless, worthless, and unloveable. As I said earlier, trans women are never permitted to be the madonna. We are like the little mermaid. We are always whores no matter how lovely we look and act and dance. We are disposable women who are inevitably doomed once a man has done as he wishes with us.
The next piece is entitled and she put a wreath of white lilies round her hair, and again the title is a quote from the little mermaid, from the start of the story rather than the end:
In this one the visual imagery is more clearly connected to the story. There are features in the piece that look a little like waves, the palette feels a little like the sea or the beach maybe, and might even be peaceful if you don’t connect it to the tragedy of the little mermaid. For me though, having made this connection, the piece has a feeling of dread or foreboding, knowing how the story will end.
Then came the ambiguously titled piece, little death at tamarama beach:
There is a lot going on in this one. Visually, the piece is dramatic and energetic. The palette is white hot and burns wildly against the black background. It feels alive, which is somewhat in contrast to the “death” referred to in the title… except the title refers to “little death”, an expression that is often interpreted metaphorically. So perhaps it refers to sex. On the other hand, it was posted immediately after the two little mermaid pieces, so perhaps the piece refers to the death of the little mermaid as she dissolves into sea foam. Perhaps the brightness refers to the strange denoument in the story where the little mermaid doesn’t truly die at the end and is transformed into an air spirit with no real explanation given.
The location of the little death is important here too. I didn’t choose Tamarama Beach arbitrarily. In real life it is the site of a memorial dedicated to gay men and transgender women targeted by hate crimes in Sydney during the 1970s and 1980s. If “little death” is interpreted sexually, the “little death at tamarama beach” might be read as sex at the beach: the parks and cliffs in the eastern suburbs of Sydney were gay beats at the time. Of course, if “death” is taken literally it might refer to the homophobic murders that took place there too.
The ambiguity here is left unresolved. Make what you will of the piece.
V. Hope
At this point in the series, there was a small tonal shift, a slightly more upbeat (or at least less bleak) interruption before it all ends as badly as you might expect. The next piece I posted was captioned isolated motel room on a wintry night, and though the palette and structure feels icy and frozen, the piece as a whole still feels quite gentle to me:
The title is – of course – about sex. Almost everything in this series is connected to sex in one way or another. What might two people be doing in a motel room along on a cold night? Sex, obviously, and quite likely illicit sex. Narratively, meeting in a hotel room is so often used to signify affairs, and I have shamelessly adopted that connotation here. Indeed, the piece is a reference to a married man who was attracted to me, and by implication the affair he wanted. Oddly, this is a situation that has arisen for me many times. I don’t love the idea of being the homewrecker in the story (who does?) but married men do cheat on their wives, and sometimes they cheat with trans women. There is a twisted upside to it from the transfem perspective though: at least in this situation his shame and need for secrecy is because he’s cheating on his wife, it’s not only because he’s ashamed to be seen with a tranny. It almost elevates me to the status a cis woman would have in this situation. Being the mistress is the upper bound on what I can aspire to in my relationships with men.
Sigh. On reflection, there is sadness mixed in here.
I posted these as a pair on social media, and at the time I simply called them “thorns”. The visual imagery here is such that the points at the bottom of the hundreds of distorted versions of the heart motif (the design of the system ensures that this is always present in the pieces, but it isn’t always obvious) look more like thorns extruding from the image. I posted a few pieces from this variant of the system, and in a couple of others the titles/captions had explicit references to grindr. Again, sex is present, but rape is not. In the end I decided to be a little more descriptive in the titles: the piece in blue is he doesn’t give me roses, and the paired red piece is he gives me thorns. This “thorns” reference has appeared in previous artwork of mine, and like the other cases it references sadomasochism. More specifically it refers to Screw the Roses, Send me the Thorns.
I have been involved with a few sadistic men, and – in all honesty – it has led to some incredibly satisfying sex. Sadism/masochism in kink is a very different proposition to the kind of sexual violence I’ve experienced with men in other contexts. In almost every case, the men I’ve subbed for in impact play have been extremely careful around consent and safety. Though my relationships with them didn’t usually end well, I think fondly of them, and feel very protective towards them. The dominant in impact play is quite vulnerable, in the sense that it would be very easy for the submissive to make false accusations and have those accusations appear to be supported by evidence. There is a bond of trust involved, one I would never and will never betray. And so for me, the emotional connotation to these thorns pieces is gentle and loving, despite the superficial harshness. As strange as it seems, this is a brief happy moment in the series.
It doesn’t last. The world is on fire, and that inevitably affects the artist:
VI. Terror
To the surprise of exactly no-one, the series does not end happily. Too many traumatic memories have intruded into the work, too many terrible things have happened in the world outside my home, and my mood is dark most of the time. It is simply the way things are in 2025.
The next piece I shared seems nice when you look at it, and it’s one of the few pieces in the series where the heart motif feels like a solid object, though the interior seems to be ripped or torn here:
When I shared this piece, the caption for it was she should have learned by now to keep her fucking mouth shut and her opinions to herself. Given this as a title, the red shade doesn’t feel very loving to me. It feels more like blood, with an implied threat of violence attached. The caption has a striking similarity to my pinned post on mastodon, which reads
I regret saying anything. I should keep my fucking thoughts to myself.
This is a sentiment I feel a lot on social media. I’ll often share something raw and/or vulnerable, capturing a strongly felt emotion I have about the state of the world, and I will almost always end up deleting it out of fear. This terror is only slightly correlated with the reactions that I receive from other people when I post. It is something deeper: I fear violent punishment for the things that I say and the things that I feel. The origin of that fear is not social media. It is simply that for most of my life my emotions have been punishable offences. I was a sissy. I was weak. I was feminine. These are crimes in the misogynistic canon that governed the kind of masculinity I was exposed to growing up. Sissy boys get beatings. It is how the world works, and that fear is deeply ingrained in me now. No matter where I go, no matter what I do, in every context, I fear violent punishment for my thoughts and feelings.
The only way to mitigate the risk of violence, especially post-transition, is to be a good girl. It is understood of course that trans women can never truly be good girls. We are whores canonically, but in fairness men rarely need an excuse to be violent to women. Transness is a convenient cover, but all women are at risk. Our best hope of escaping violence is to be demure, but we all know it only works sometimes.
So now we come to one of the nastiest pieces I shared on social media:
The art itself is completely at odds with the title. The piece is soft and pastel, almost cloyingly so, and I deliberately called it bruises mark his hands at her throat…
This one is autobiographical too. It doesn’t refer to a specific event though. One of the most utterly terrifying thing about men, in my experience, is that they love choking women during sex. They don’t ask consent. I don’t know how to express how utterly terrifying this is. Every time it happens I freeze. In the kink world, one thing everyone knows is that breath play is high-risk. You’re far, far more likely to end up in the hospital from strangulation than from whipping. It’s something that is never done without a lot of care, because it’s inherently risky. Outside that world… my god, men are cavalier about this. Few things in life make me as frightened as the thought of a man’s hands wrapping around my throat, and when I think back about my experiences it is horrifying to realise how many times this has happened without my consent.
What is even more horrifying, is that my experiences aren’t unusual. Something I learned after transitioning is that this happens to a lot of women. Men just do this, and they think nothing of it, as if strangulation is something that usually happens in sex. It is astonishing to me that this happens. So why did I choose to pair this title with this piece? Honestly, the answer is entirely for shock value. The jarring sensation of looking at the soft gentle piece and then being unexpectedly slammed by the cruelty of the title is, well, it’s a very very small proxy for what it feels like when a man unexpectedly grabs you by the throat.
Sigh. Moving along…
I like this piece. It’s genuinely gentle. It feels like I’m looking at stars twinkling in the night, with gorgeous little sparks rising from below. I can’t stop myself from thinking that the secondary contour around the heart motif represents the moon. Naturally, because my mood was so bleak, I used the title to twist the interpretation of the piece and make it sinister: good night princess, sweet dreams, lie still, don’t resist. The implication of sexual violence is only barely concealed, and now the night time scenery in the piece feels dangerous to me. The framing around the heart now feels like crosshairs. It feels like I am being hunted.
That feeling intensifies in the next piece, he says he’ll be gentle:
I think this might be my favourite piece in the series. It is the first one where the vines/tentacles truly emerge. The machinery that produces them had been latent in the previous variant: the sparks in the good night princess are produced by the same mechanism that creates tentacles in he says he’ll be gentle, which to my mind makes both pieces a lot more sinister than they might otherwise appear. I hadn’t even included this mechanism intentionally: it’s a byproduct of the changes I made to produce the “moon” in the earlier piece.
But in any case, this piece feels to me like I am seeing deep red tentacles rising up from the depths to strangle the heart. Paired with title, it is of course intended as a representation of sexual violence, or at least the threat thereof, and when given that interpretation the red shade feels less like lipstick and more like blood. It is visually striking, but it is not at all nice.
Which brings me to one of the strangest pieces in the whole series, side effects include numbness and disorientation:
This is one of those pieces where the system completely surprised me. The triangular shapes are another manifestation of the same mechanism that usually produces those tentacles. The expression is entirely different here: it only occasionally comes out like this. Similarly, the palette is a little unusual. The desaturated and faded look isn’t very common in the hearts pieces: this one is an exception to the usual rule. The piece feels distant, detached. The title echoes that feeling. Unfortunately, the event it references is one in which – as far as I can tell – a man appears to have drugged and raped me. I don’t really know though, because I don’t remember very much of the experience. He bought me a drink, I blacked out, and when my memory returned I was naked in his bed with his dick in my mouth. To say that it was a frightening moment to regain conscious recollection is something of an understatement.
My therapist had some stern words for me about it about proper safety behaviour around men, and how this does not include letting them buy you drinks. In hindsight, I have to admit she had a point. In brutal honesty, my risk-taking behaviour around men is shockingly dangerous. There’s a reason that these things have happened to me so often: I put myself in situations where they are likely to happen. I expose myself to risks when it comes to men, and the thing about taking risks is that sometimes you don’t win.
Case in point. The story of how I met a man who later stalked and raped me is neatly captured by the title of the next piece the bar is crowded but it’s mardi gras, so no-one but her will mind if he slides his hand under her skirt and grabs her by the
The piece is… actually it’s amazing. The pale gold and black palette is gorgeous, the vines and tentacles are foreboding but not as actively hostile as in some of these pieces. It’s another one I adore on a purely visual level, but paired with that title the tentacles feel threatening, much like a man who unexpectedly slides his hand under your skirt and grabs you by the…
…well, that’s a dangerous sentence for a trans woman to complete, no? Let’s not.
The series ends with an ambiguous piece, one that – thankfully – is not autobiographical. Everyone knows the most dangerous moment in an abusive relationship is when the victim tries to leave. That’s when he’s most likely to kill her. The series ends with she tries to leave, and I don’t know what happens to her next. I hope she makes it.
Reuse
Citation
@online{navarro2025,
author = {Navarro, Danielle},
title = {Making Menacing Hearts},
date = {2025-04-17},
url = {https://blog.djnavarro.net/posts/2025-04-17_making-menacing-hearts/},
langid = {en}
}