Kum V. or Kum the Klown, alter ego of poet Kim Vodicka, is “editor in mischief” at Cum Punk magazine—an XXX magazine, artist collective, and publishing company whose John Waters-meets-Georges Bataille-meets-Juggalo-Larry Flynt aesthetic emerged in 2025 and immediately, inexplicably, made me—and apparently quite a few others—feel that we had found our tribe. Cum Punk has recently published both its first print magazine issue and Madison Murray’s My Gaping Masshole: Just the PiXXX and is launching an educational series this fall featuring workshops and lectures by Cletus Crow, Emma Reed Jones (this author), Madison Murray, and Nastya Valentine. Cum Punk will also be publishing a novel by Mr. Omar King and Emma Lee Benson titled Memoirs of a Gimp. A launch party for the print magazine is scheduled for October 27 in Los Angeles in collaboration with Perverted By Language.
Earlier this year, when I read Cum Punk’s online issue #3, “Fiery Femcel Fury,” co-edited by Kum V. and Madison Murray—which tackles, in signature style, the failures of heterosexuality—I knew I had to reach out to talk to Kim. I needed to know more about the mind behind this unique brand of madness.
We met on Zoom to talk about all things Cum Punk; “The Dick Inside” (Kim’s name for the internalized male gaze or pornographic imagination); her thoughts on heteropessimism; observations on the indie lit scene; and more.
A condensed account of our conversation, edited for clarity and length, follows.
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ERJ: Kum the Klown, Kum V., or Kim Vodicka?
KV: They're all the same person. Spoiler alert. I've always used my full Christian government fucking name on everything I've done, no matter what it is and how crazy it is. However, there's something about Cum Punk that feels like a bridge too far—even for people who accept me, let’s say unconditionally.
ERJ: So, what is Cum Punk? I think you answered it—it’s a bridge too far.
KV: That's actually a pretty good tag line. I think people [encountering Cum Punk] are like—what?
ERJ: That’s part of the aesthetic.
KV: Yes. Cum Punk is a venue for the realm of pure fantasy, words and ideas and freedom, the pornographic imagination. I want it to look in your face. I want it to look provocative. It's meant to be very attention-getting and even sort of off-putting. But some people immediately resonate with it.
EJ: Who resonates?
KV: I think some people are just tired of all the forced, insincere, polite bullshit going on. It makes intuitive sense to [those] people. Some people have a hard time sitting in a space of not understanding. Maybe they don't like poetry, or they struggle with certain abstract art; they don't like to feel they're not getting something. Cum Punk is resonating with people who are NOT uncomfortable in that type of space.
ERJ: Cum Punk contains multitudes. Can we say that?
KV: We can say it. For sure it does.
ERJ: And one of the reasons I wanted to do this interview was the Femcel issue [“Fiery Femcel Fury,” online issue #3]. I had seen the call for submissions and thought, what’s a femcel? Am I one, even if I’m not celibate? But when I read the issue, it wasn’t what I thought.
KV: There's no good way to put this, but the first time I heard the word “femcel” it was associated with a female mass shooter. I heard somebody say, or I read something where somebody said, “we have our first femcel mass shooter.” And I was already familiar with incel obviously. And I was like, femcel, huh. Okay. Like, I love that. I do feel like with age, I'm sort of involuntarily celibate because all these dudes have blown their dicks out on porn and they all have intimacy phobia. I can't even tell you how many times in the past year or two I'm with a dude and he just fucking can't get it up. Like at all. And I'm talking young, like 20-somethings in some cases. I'm almost 40. I'm having a little age insecurity, which is annoying. But I do think there's something deeper going on with the mechanics of manhood.
ERJ: Have you heard about heteropessimism?
KV: Heteropessimism is a lovely word. That's actually a new one for me. My own version of femceldom definitely was rooted in feeling like I am suddenly involuntarily celibate because no one under the male death sun either wants to fuck me or literally can, even if they want to, so it created a very profound heteropessimism where I was like trying to—I'm going to get canceled for probably half this shit I'm saying—but I was like, I just wish I could be a lesbian. I'm sure so many people have this thought, like I've been with women and I consider myself pansexual; but sadly, I like dick too much. It's a shame really. It's a shame. It's a fucking waste.
I was almost trying to reverse conversion therapy myself earlier this year by watching a bunch of lesbian erotica movies, like Blue is the Warmest Color. I finally watched that for the first time and I loved it. I watched it like four times in a row. I was like, “I'm going to watch this movie until I turn gay.”
ERJ: I tried that in my twenties. It didn’t take.
KV: Heterosexuality is like pain shopping and like a death wish. That’s what it feels like. And it's a two edged thing. There's a very clear and obvious social aspect of it. But I also think there's a personal element. It's possible to be a victim of society and also self-perpetuate a victim complex. That's pretty much what it's like to be a woman at any given time.
ERJ: I think in your writing on these topics you’ve found a different way to use language, rather than another think piece on “heteropessimism,” which can come more from a place of complaint or be less tied to sexuality. Those kind of, you know, Atlantic-style thinkpieces seem more focused on the idea that we were sold a bill of goods on this whole heterosexual marriage and family thing.
KV: That’s what makes it Cum Punk. Because at, at, at first blush, it might be like, how does femcel, which sort of implies celibacy, have anything to do with cumming? But you can't have an honest conversation about heteropessimism without talking about how fucked up the sexual element is. It’s ignoring the most obvious thing in the room—I just feel like everyone is pretentious, everyone under the sun, because we all pretend in our everyday lives like we don't fuck. Like we don’t have some type of erotic life or erotic shadow.
ERJ: Let’s talk about “the dick inside.” I noticed it first in an earlier Cum Punk issue where you had some pieces that were attributed to an author called “The Dick Inside Kum V.” Then, in the femcel issue, you elaborated The Dick Inside more as its own philosophy.
KV: The dick inside idea is like internalized misogyny, internalized male gaze, internalized male impotence, even. And sort of the built in pain of being alive. You have this dick inside that's just constantly fucking you. But like, you're also fucking yourself with it. You're being fucked, but you're also fucking yourself, which is exactly what we just said about like the victim/victim complex thing.
The Dick Inside becomes like a character in addition to a concept, like the idea of a piece written by “The Dick Inside.”
So, the demented thing with my pornographic imagination is that I have an excessive amount of erotic empathy. For example, let’s say I have a lover. And I have a sense of what sexually turns them on. And I know that because I fucked them, we've talked about it, whatever. And there's maybe like a deeper layer of it that they have not said anything about that I'm just kind of picking up on or sensing or maybe I'm even just projecting it or something, who knows. But that is what will start to be arousing to me. So when I'm just, like, in my bed jerking off with my eyes closed, not watching porn or whatever, one frequently occurring thing is exactly what I'm saying, where it's like this erotic empathy with the person.
ERJ: Erotic empathy with The Dick Inside.
KV: Right. I think about what turns a man on because that's what gets my dick inside hard and then makes me cum to the point where, like, I am rarely personally involved in my own sexual fantasies. Like, I'm not there. I'm receiving 100% of the pleasure happening in my body, but I'm not actually there.
I’ve started doing a project called Externalizing the Dick Inside. The whole thing with that is masturbating without porn or anything that could be considered porn. No external stimulus. And then immediately afterwards writing out in as much detail as possible and with minimal editing the contents of my mind during the wank sesh without embellishing—really trying to be just as raw and honest as possible. I have this probably overly optimistic hope that by doing this, something more like my own gaze can emerge.
And I think this is why men struggle so hard. They cannot relate to this type of mind at all. They honestly can't even fathom this.
ERJ: Their [pornographic imagination] is already externalized.
KV: That’s exactly right. I'm very porn positive. But at the same time, the general landscape of it is very, like, cishet bro, you know, so I feel like my pornographic imagination is very cishet bro-informed. And it almost feels like the new fertility goddess is a porn star, but all of the reverence of that has been removed. So that’s one reason for Cum Punk. I feel committed to restoring the goddess to porn.
ERJ: Yeah! That reminds me, I was also excited about your concept of the “monstrous masculine,” also from the femcel issue. In my mind, masculinity by itself is not bad or monstrous at all, but it can become monstrous when it thinks it’s the only thing—when it becomes cut off from a relationship with something other than it and kind of takes over. What do you think?
KV: Yeah, that's exactly right. And this also can tie into paganism. Like, the goddess is often three-form, and if you only have one of the three, then it's out of balance.
ERJ: What we're talking about is masculinity out of balance.
KV: Right. I do think that the world we are living in is like, total monstrous masculine takeover. There is something that we might call masculinity properly understood. I do believe that exists. I would characterize it as divine masculine. I just think it is so uncommon that we ever really see that.
Jack Parsons, the rocket scientist, in the 40s and 50s, he had this whole occult life and I’m sure he was a super flawed human being, but I do feel like there's something about my understanding of him that is like, that’s kind of what [divine masculinity] looks like. His essay “Freedom is a Two-Edged Sword” is one of my absolute favorite things I've ever read in my entire life. It ends with him basically invoking a female messiah who he envisions as coming in to save the world. And he leads up to this by talking about—definitely not in the same words—but about how fucked up things are because of men and like, women have been done wrong and it's time to rise up. Jack Parsons is totally a femcel. At least an ally.
ERJ: In our email exchange, you said, “everywhere I go, people are dead inside.” Please elaborate.
KV: Well, if you seek to understand Cum Punk, you must first ask yourself “what is cum?” [laughs]. In my view it's life energy. I view it as a very positive thing and it's not limited to just the male ejaculate. It is life energy and everywhere. And so when it comes to things I won't put in the magazine—because there are things I won't put in it, believe it or not—if I get something in the inbox, and if it feels like death energy, I will reject it. And I make space for pretty hardcore transgressive and even edgelord-y stuff, in addition to the femcel type of content, but it’s just a feeling I get. I don't like things that feel sort of against the human soul.
ERJ: You’ve been involved in the indie lit scene for decades. How have things changed during that time? And what’s your point of view on making your own way outside of institutions? We talked a little about this over email.
KV: I'm in my late 30s. I did the whole undergrad-straight-into-MFA-program thing, so I was done with all of that very young, before I was 25. And I had my first full length book of poetry come out while I was still in graduate school, which was actually incredibly awkward. People were weird to me about it. But essentially, I got my start through academia. I wrote poems throughout high school—I sent you some for the 2003 thing [Project 2003]; that was the year I was starting to take myself seriously as a writer.
But in short I think the academy is dead now. Whatever glimmer of life it might have still had in it, it’s over, especially with this administration right now. And of course the academic job market is trash and never going to get better. But I think people are hungry for alternative academia-type venues. People are wanting to attend a kind of offbeat workshop or lecture, which is why Cum Punk is starting to offer lecture series with guest hosts—like I’m hoping you will do the one [on “Get Low” by Lil’ Jon].
ERJ: I'm totally gonna do it. The academy is dead; long live Cum Punk!
KV: There's going to be more of that. All of this is sort of under the umbrella of the Cum Punk PhD program. Some of the funnest, most amazing things I've ever encountered were in academic environments. So it's taking the best of that type of stuff and repackaging it more for the general public and not having any sort of restrictions to accessing it. I mean, we will be charging because we can’t afford not to, but we will also have a scholarship program, spots donated. That is part of our future plan.
Right now is actually one of the most interesting times I've ever seen in writing. Because we're finally getting out of the pod people times—I call them pod people because they're just pointing and screeching and policing what everybody does and this and that. That definitely basically ruined everything. It was a reign of terror that lasted about a solid decade. We're coming out of it now. And we're in such a heavy kind of oppressive [regime] that I think people are more inclined to just be like, balls to the wall, letting it all hang out and just supermanning themselves off cliffs—people are taking more risks. Now is the time!
I've been in the game a long time, you know. You'd have to be insane. Which I am. You'd have to be crazy to continue being in the game this long without having had any real significant wins. So that's why I'm crazy and that's why I'm a clown.
ERJ: You’ve been dealing with a fair bit of censorship when it comes to Cum Punk.
KV: We've had two payment processors block us from taking payments on our website. We’ve already burned through one Instagram account. Our Twitter got suspended. Even our printer that we've been using for all of our stuff so far—for Madison [Murray’s] book, My Gaping Masshole and for the mini mag—they rejected Cum Punk magazine issue number one just recently on account of pornographic content. So I found a different printer, and we're good now, but this is just ridiculous.
I'm trying to start making some noise about this. I did reach out to the National Coalition Against Censorship recently and filed a report about all the different things we've been banned on or flagged on. They don't respond to everybody, but they replied to me. “Dear Kum the Klown” [laughs]. It sounds like they might want to meet up and talk.
I'm not changing any goddamn thing. I'm not changing the name. I'm not dumbing it down for Instagram. I've had to start putting little emojis over certain words, which I don't even want to do. But purely for the sake of trying to have some link to the public.
I'm in Tennessee as well, so I mean, what I'm doing is probably illegal here. So I’ve got bigger problems—when people are talking about the latest social media drama or like, maybe there's like the dregs of pod people stuff happening—I'm like, I'm literally waiting for when the cops knock on my door.
ERJ: It puts it in perspective, yeah.
KV: Future plans for Cum Punk—bail me out of jail, please. Or at least write to me while I'm in prison.
I want to try to become basically the Larry Flynt of the lit world, which I probably already am; but I really would like to see this have a life outside of the insularity of [the online lit world], so we'll see. I got big dreams. I got big delusions of grandeur. And we will see if I am actually grand enough to make them a reality. We’ll see if my delusions of grandeur are any match for actual grandeur.
ERJ: I don't know that those two things are different, honestly.
KV: That’s comforting.
