Investigating the Archetype of ‘Ideal Womxn’ and the Subconscious Architecture of Social Mobility Within the Framework of Sex Work as Industry

V for Vicious is a conceptual, multidisciplinary, and collaborative methodology facilitated by Kait Vicious, a self-taught, multidisciplinary artist, performance paintress, Dominatrix, and activist. Economic power, independence, autonomy, equality of opportunity, boundaried engagement, negotiation, and consent are at the forefront of creative pursuits because they are at the forefront of lived experience.

V for Vicious Project is an ongoing investigation, exploration, and collaboration around the nuances of Sex Work as Industry and the socio-economic-political question of Social Mobility through co-creation and dialogue with womxn of diverse social, economic, political, and sexual backgrounds and preferences to create a series of portraits, conversations, panel discussions, performances, and installations which dive deeper into the lived experience of Social Mobility within Sex Work as Industry.

Ideals of womxnhood function in practicality as the aggregate of social, economic, political, and technological forces converging to produce a highly curated image of femininity, one which is both symbol and symptom of a deeper cultural pathology: a subject conditioned to aestheticize her own captivity. Her image represents the triumph of the Self Directed Womxn—which is itself a mirror within a mirror—concentric, propagating, bottomless. Womxn is a voyeur upon herself, yet beneath this performative autonomy lies the deeper condition of obedience which yields to the established hierarchies of class, race, gender, and labor.

Angela Carter’s The Sadeian Woman provides a critical lens through which to examine this phenomenon. Carter writes, “although the erotic relationship may seem to exist freely, on its own terms, among the distorted social relationships of a bourgeois society, it is, in fact, the most self-conscious of all human relationships, a direct confrontation of two beings whose actions in the bed are wholly determined by their acts when they are out of it.” Carter’s observation reveals that one’s sexual expression is not a private or isolated experience but an extension of the established social order—what appears as desire is often the subconscious performativity of established roles and power dynamics.

V for Vicious Project expands upon this insight, utilizing Embodied Research, Conceptual Journalism, and Performance Activism to further investigate how Sex Work as Industry is shaped primarily by the socio-economic-political conditions which define who may lead, who may yield, and who must constantly negotiate between the two. The project posits that contemporary ideals of femininity, veiled by the illusion of autonomy and self-directed optimization further alienate womxn from accessing modes of genuine Social Mobility.

Through this process of integration, V for Vicious Project proposes a new model of knowledge-making—one that privileges sensation over abstraction and lived experience over theory. Here, art becomes both portal and pedagogy, guiding participants toward an embodied literacy of power. In this way, the project extends beyond critique into praxis: the reclamation of the erotic as a dynamic field of self-knowledge, resistance, and transformation.