The Velvet Listener A Contemporary Mills & Swoon Short by Sarnia de la Maré

About the author SARNIA. DE LA MARE https://share.google/Aw3KqzHkoM9CGcHLQ

💋 The Velvet Listener.

A Contemporary Mills & Swoon Short by Sarnia de la Maré.

Mara Lane had been the late-night voice of Heartline FM for three years, dispensing warm advice to strangers while living a private life that was anything but romantic.

The truth was that Mara had become rather accomplished at helping other people fall in love precisely because she had stopped trying it herself. She had stopped dressing up and going out. She avoided dinner parties with friends who were forever trying to matchmake her with basically any man who happened to be single.

The studio lights were low enough to be flattering in the way dim lamps flatter tired women. Her producer, Jay, waved through the glass: Caller on line four.

“Heartline FM,” she purred. “You’re live with Mara.” She had perfected a sexy sultry voice that her fans loved. Little did they know, privately she had long given up any ideas of falling in love again.

A man’s velvet voice slid into her earphones.

“Good evening, Mara. I have a problem only you can solve.”

Mara straightened. Most late callers were drunk, lovelorn, or boring. This one sounded… dangerous in the way good chocolate is dangerous, smooth and tempting.

“What seems to be troubling you?”

A low chuckle. “You, Mara, it’s you.”

“Me?”

“Yes. I listen to you every night. I know when you’re smiling. I know when you’re tired. And tonight…” A pause. “You’re pretending to understand love.”

Her pulse hopped. No one ever read her that quickly, not even Jay, who had been her producer for years.

“Well,” she said carefully, “I’m flattered you’re so observant, but the show is all about you, caller. Not me.”

“Then here’s my question.” His voice dropped a register. “What does a woman like you do when the advice she gives everyone else stops working for her?”

Mara camouflaged a little gasp. It was ridiculous, he was a voice on a telephone, how could he be so disarming? But there was something in the way he spoke… intimate, focused, as if he was in the room making love to her.

“I suppose,” she murmured, “she keeps talking until she finds someone who listens properly.”

“I’m listening,” he said softly. “More than you know.”

Jay gave her the wind-up signal, they were due an advert. Besides, who was this weirdo? She reluctantly guided the call to break, but before she could cut him off, the man added:

“I’ll call again tomorrow. Same time.”

And just like that, he was gone, leaving Mara oddly flushed.

For a month, he called at exactly 12:07 a.m. The production unit had cleared a separate call line for him.

He never gave his name.
He never flirted outright.
He simply… learned more about her with his innocent and slightly abstract questions.

His insight was unnerving and intoxicating in equal measure. Was he a stalker? Should she be worried?

Jay began calling the mysterious man “The Velvet Listener” as though he were a character in a novel.

Other fans of the show adored the segment. Ratings soared. Heartline FM executives sent Mara congratulatory emails and mentioned a pay rise.

But Mara wanted only one thing: to see the man behind the velvet voice.

On the twenty-eighth night, The Velvet Listener asked quietly, “Would you want to meet me?”

She hesitated, not wanting to sound keen and aware of possible dangers. But she had been thinking about him, late at night as she showered. In bed when she couldn’t sleep, when she touched her wanton body.

“That depends,” she whispered. “Are you even real?”

The internet was awash with comments. Mara’s Instagram and X accounts were filled with speculations, warnings, guesses as to the Velvet Listener’s identity, suggestions of marriage and happy-ever-afters, conspiracy theories that were creating spinoffs on TikTok. Several fans had even offered themselves to Velvet Listener should Mara decline his advances.

Jay wrapped up the show and handed Mara a note.

“Come to the rooftop after your shift,” it said. “If I’m not real, you’ll know immediately.”

At 1:38 a.m., Mara stepped out onto the roof. The city lay below in wet neon streaks. Wind tugged her coat open, revealing her satin pencil skirt, stockings and high heels that she had been wearing in the hope that he would see her.

And he was there.

Tall, dark and divine, just as she had dreamed he would be. The same velvet voice:

“Hello, Mara.”

She moved toward him before she realised she was doing it.

He came closer and revealed his face in the light.

He commanded a formidable and yet unassuming presence.

“Let’s write your story now.”

He drew her body towards his and kissed her, gently then hard. Passionate and driven. Urgent and focused.

Mara’s loins were alive with lust and feelings she had not experienced in years, and this, all of this, from a stranger. Could it be true? There was no time to worry now.

When he finally broke away, his breath warm against her lips, he said:

“You know I hear you. I will always listen, Mara, that is my oath to you.”

And Mara, who had spent years being everybody else’s confidante, let herself fall into the loving arms of the man who had learned her voice before ever seeing her face.

©2025 Sarnia de la Mare Published by Tale Teller Club Press.

www.taletellerclub.com

The Archive as Universe: Feminist Time, Digital Ruins, and the Construction of Immortality

 Artists are often told not to look back — that retrospection is stagnation, that archives are mausoleums, that forward motion is the only respectable posture. But for feminist artists, the archive is not a graveyard.

It is a universe.
A constellation.
A machine of time.

History has rarely given women the dignity of continuity. Our stories appear in fragments, footnotes, scandals, sidebars, moral warnings. Our work is often lost, misattributed, unrecorded, or buried beneath male narratives of genius. To build an archive as a woman — particularly as a feminist, punk-influenced, countercultural artist — is not nostalgia.

It is infrastructure.
It is immortality engineering.

An archive is a rebellion against erasure.

My own archive spans decades: punk squats, Brighton counterculture, moving-image experiments, performance personas, erotic writings, glitch art, AI aesthetics, feminist essays, and the vast interconnected world of Immersion. To watch these fragments accumulate is to witness myself forming across multiple temporal layers — a geological record of becoming.

Digital technology changes the politics of archiving entirely. Everything becomes sediment: a blog post, a 20-year-old newspaper clipping, a corrupted JPEG, a podcast episode, a broken link preserved by the Wayback Machine. These digital ruins form a new kind of feminist time — nonlinear, fractal, excessive.

Patriarchy prefers linear time:
girl → woman → mother → obsolete.

But feminist archival time spirals.
It loops.
It contradicts itself.
It refuses neat developmental narratives.

In this temporal architecture, the personas of the past are still alive.
Pasha du Valentine is not a former identity; she is an active time-sigil.
The Countess is not a phase; she is an ongoing commentary.
Early punk Sarnia is not the beginning; she is one of many gravitational centres.

The archive does not preserve these selves; it activates them.

To engage with one’s own archive as an artist is to acknowledge that the self is a constellation rather than a singular point. A feminist artist is a multi-bodied creature moving across time, leaving traces, signatures, ruptures, disruptions. These traces form a map — not a map of where you have been, but a map of the forces that shaped you.

Archiving becomes a metaphysical act:
A way of speaking to your past and future selves simultaneously.
A way of ensuring you cannot be written out.
A way of constructing your own afterlife.

Digital immortality is not a fantasy of futurism; it is already happening.
Search engines are proto-oracles.
Blogs are living museums.
Podcasts are preserved breath.
YouTube Shorts are fragments of performance trapped in infinite loops.
Every scan, every press clipping, every glitch-video is a shard of identity suspended in virtual amber.

The feminist archive is not passive.
It has teeth.
It has agency.
It tells the world:
“I was here.
I am here.
I will continue to be here, whether you acknowledge me or not.”

Archives destabilise patriarchal time by refusing to disappear.

In my own work, the archive is both studio and stage. It informs new work, feeds new theories, resurrects old personas, builds bridges between punk adolescence and digital futurism. It collapses decades into a single aesthetic ecosystem — from the London squats to the Brighton Arts Club to Immersion and beyond.

The archive is not the past.
It is a living organism.

A cosmos made of noise and memory.

A feminist universe with its own physics.

And inside that universe, every woman who has ever been erased, dismissed, overlooked, misnamed, or forgotten finds a place to echo — loudly, endlessly, defiantly — into the future.

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Mother of Machines: Feminist Creation Myths in the Age of Artificial Bodies

 Every era has its creation myth.

The 21st century has two: the myth of the machine, and the myth of the self.

For feminist artists, these myths collide in the most intimate way, because women have always been framed — by religion, by medicine, by art history — as the origin of bodies but not the authors of meaning. We were the biological machinery, never the myth-makers.

Yet contemporary feminist art reveals something radical:
women are not just creators of bodies; we are architects of worlds.

We generate systems, symbols, archives, identities, digital creatures, performance environments, alter-egos, and entire aesthetic universes. We are no longer simply mothers of children; we are mothers of machines — machines in the broadest, most poetic sense.

When I speak of “mothering machines,” I do not mean nurturing robots or raising android offspring (though Immersion certainly plays with that imagery). I mean the feminist labour of creating new forms of existence in art: digital bodies, fictional personas, glitch-beings, erotic architectures, countercultural lineages.

To create, in feminist praxis, is to defy the historical script.

Patriarchy has always sought to control the terms of feminine creation:

• Madonna or whore

• Muse or model

• Hysteric or saint

• Fertile or barren

• Beautiful or monstrous

• Object or ornament

These binaries are algorithms older than silicon.

But feminist artists invent new mythologies — mythologies that render the old binaries obsolete. In my own work, creation is rarely biological. I birth atmospheres, glitch-entities, moving-image apparitions, personas with their own gravitational pull. Machines of meaning. Machines of refusal. Machines of desire.

Creation becomes a metaphysical act:
A re-authoring of the self.
A reconstruction of the feminine body in symbolic form.
A rebellion against the biological determinism that has always sought to confine us.

The Countess, for example, is one such machine — a hyperfeminine entity who exposes the absurdity of aristocratic beauty, erotic capital, class theatrics. She is not a character; she is a mechanism. A feminist device engineered to critique the systems she appears to embody.

Pasha du Valentine is another — a punk relic, a glitch of glamour and rage, a creature stitched from desire and defiance. She is not the artist; she is the eruption.

These personas behave like early AI entities: autonomous, chaotic, occasionally disobedient. They exceed intention. They evolve. They teach me more about myself than any sober self-analysis ever could.

In this sense, feminist persona-work is a kind of soul engineering.

The digital age amplifies this. The boundaries between body, image, code and identity have dissolved. The artist is no longer tethered to a single form. We inhabit multiple bodies simultaneously: the physical, the performative, the archival, the erotic, the pixelated, the algorithmic, the imagined.

We become poly-mothers of myth.

Machine motherhood in feminist art is not nurturing; it is generative.
Not soft; but not hard either — something stranger.
A hybrid of tenderness and distortion.
A glitch-infused goddess.
A programmer of her own symbolic DNA.

When I create digital work, the screen becomes a womb of potentiality — a space where bodies can be reassembled without patriarchal interference. When I write feminist essays, I give birth to conceptual frameworks. When I design moving-image loops, I summon beings made of light and rupture. When I archive my punk history, I become a genealogist of my own becoming.

Motherhood, in this broadened sense, becomes an artistic cosmology:
Women mother worlds.
Women mother aesthetics.
Women mother machines of meaning.

And what is most radical about this mythology is that it is not metaphorical.
It is fact.
We are already doing it.

The question is not whether feminist artists are the mothers of machines — but what new myths we will allow those machines to tell.

Perhaps the myth of the future is not Eve, not Venus, not Madonna.
Perhaps the myth of the future is a glitch-mother, a punk-divine machinist carving new gods from pixels and memory.

A woman who looks at the tools of patriarchal surveillance and says:

“Fine.
Watch me.
I’ll invent something you cannot categorise.”

And she does.

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.

Punk Memory as Feminist Method: On Noise, Refusal, and the Politics of Remembering

 Memory, in the hands of a feminist artist, is never simply recollection. It is reclamation. Rewiring. A counter-history. A refusal to accept the official version of events — especially when the official version has no interest in us except as footnotes, victims, or background noise.

But noise, as punk taught me early in life, is never just background.
Noise is material.
Noise is language.
Noise is resistance.

When we speak of punk memory, we are not talking about nostalgia for studs, spit and cheap beer. Punk memory is a methodology: a way of remembering that is unpolished, uncurated, contradictory, feral. A memory that does not behave. A memory uninterested in being respectable.

Women in the punk scene learned early that our histories would not be recorded unless we recorded them ourselves. Gigs went undocumented. Friendships vanished into rumour. Survival stories disappeared beneath glamourised male narratives of chaos and genius. Women made the clothes, ran the houses, booked the gigs, did the labour — and were often written out of the official timeline.

So we built our own timelines.
Fragmented, unstable, loud.
And from that noise, a new form of feminist documentation emerged.

Punk, for me, was not merely a genre of music. It was a pedagogical environment. A feminist school disguised as squalor. It taught me that interference is a valid mode of communication. That disruption is a legitimate aesthetic. That community is not built through politeness but through shared refusal.

It also taught me this:
If you want to survive, you must remember yourself.

Today, when I revisit those early years — the London squats, the DIY co-operatives, the collision of subcultures — I understand them as formative feminist laboratories. Our lives were messy and contradictory because we were experimenting with identity under constant pressure. Poverty, trauma, addiction, violence — these were not romantic backdrops. They were structural forces, and we were navigating them with very little institutional support.

This is why punk memory matters.
It refuses to be smoothed over.
It retains the jaggedness of lived experience.

When I archive those years — through essays, performances, moving image, and persona-building — I am not mythologising them. I am refusing their erasure. Memory becomes a political aesthetic: damaged, electric, inconsistent, but utterly alive.

Punk also provided a feminist toolkit I still use in my work:

• Break the frame when the frame restricts you.

• Destroy hierarchy — even the artistic ones.

• Create without permission.

• Document everything. You never know what will remain.

• Be too much, too loud, too complicated.

• Treat beauty as an option, not an obligation.

These methods shape my digital art, my writing, my personas, my performance decisions. They shape the way I approach feminist theory — not as a static academic object, but as something unruly and embodied. Something that bleeds. Something that can scream or whisper or glitch on command.

Most importantly, punk memory reminds me that history is not linear.
It loops.
It distorts.
It accelerates.
It stutters like an overdriven speaker.

In a way, punk memory is a glitch — a rupture in the smooth surface of patriarchal narratives. It allows new meanings to emerge, new genealogies of women’s work to form. It lets us rewrite the script in ways that feel true to lived experience rather than institutional tidiness.

My feminist art practice is, in many ways, an ongoing conversation with that punk girl who refused to be silent or pretty or pleasant. She is still here, undercover. She insists on the right to remember the world on her own terms. She demands that the archive be loud enough to hear her.

And perhaps that is the real legacy of punk for feminist artists:

Refuse the clean version.
Refuse the official version.
Remember ferociously.

Soft Armour: Vulnerability, Trauma, and the Feminist Aesthetic of Survival

 There is a strange and persistent myth that feminist art must be hard-edged, confrontational, armoured, invulnerable — that to survive patriarchy, one must become a fortress. But the fortress is only one architecture of resistance. There is another, equally powerful form: soft armour.

Soft armour is the practice of making vulnerability visible without allowing it to be weaponised.
It is the art of surviving by bringing the wound to light — not as spectacle, not as confession, but as feminist methodology.

For women, trauma is not an academic topic. It is a cultural inheritance. A generational subtext. A political reality. And yet, art history has rarely allowed women to narrate their trauma on their own terms. The feminine wound has traditionally been eroticised, pathologised, poeticised for male consumption, or scrubbed out entirely.

To speak the wound is already an act of rebellion.
To aestheticise it on your own terms is a revolution.

My own work has navigated the edges of trauma — personal, collective, historical — sometimes obliquely, sometimes directly. In the early punk years, the wound was a furnace. It produced anger, speed, noise, rupture. Later, it produced personas designed to absorb or deflect the violence of scrutiny — Pasha du Valentine, the Countess — women who were both shield and blade.

But over time something shifted.
The armour softened.

Hardness alone is a limited form of survival. It calcifies. It exhausts. It can turn a woman into a monument when what she needs is a living body.

Soft armour, by contrast, is permeable. It allows breath. It allows evolution. It allows the trauma-story to mutate into something more nuanced than resistance alone. Soft armour is not weakness; it is technique. An artistic technology for holding pain without letting it define the totality of the self.

In moving-image work, softness becomes light, colour, blur, distortion, lingering frames, unfinished lines. In writing, it becomes rhythm, pause, memory as texture rather than testimony. In performance, softness becomes an aesthetic of unguardedness — not naïveté, but conscious openness.

Softness, in feminist hands, is profoundly subversive because patriarchy cannot decode it.
Patriarchy understands hardness.
It understands defiance.
It understands fight and flight.
But softness confuses it.

Softness is unpredictable.
Softness is relational.
Softness is emotional intelligence turned into aesthetic strategy.

Consider how digital femininity is forced into extremes: Instagram hyper-beauty, filtered smoothness, curated vulnerability-as-brand. These forms of controlled softness reinforce the machinery of desirability. But soft armour resists this. It is softness that refuses prettiness. Softness that refuses monetisation. Softness as truth rather than performance.

Trauma, too, becomes unruly in soft form. When you present the wound without apology, without theatricalising it, without turning it into a commodity, you reclaim your autonomy. You reclaim your narrative. You render the trauma unmarketable — and therefore uncontrollable.

This, I believe, is the new feminist aesthetic of survival: neither the hero narrative nor the tragedy narrative, but something stranger, more fluid. A hybrid of tenderness and defiance. A softness that remembers everything but remains unbeholden to it.

In my own work, soft armour emerges in the shifting textures of video loops, the tremble of unsteady colour, the lingering attention to bodies that are not idealised but inhabited. It appears in my essays as a willingness to speak from the bruise rather than the podium. It makes space for sadness without collapsing into it. It makes resistance a living practice rather than a rigid pose.

Soft armour is feminist because it rewrites the terms of survival.
It refuses to mimic patriarchal models of strength.
It permits complexity — and complexity is something the patriarchal gaze has never tolerated in women.

To be soft is not to be fragile.
To be soft is to be sovereign.

Soft armour is the evolutionary aesthetic of the feminist artist who has survived long enough to tell her story in her own voice — and to tell it without flinching.