Stop the Presses
It's about that time
In this edition of The Reverse Cowgirl Roundup: it’s all right there in black and white, Leigh Bowery lands at a museum, you might want to take the pervert test, quilts get graphic, when Alan Moore foresaw the future of pornography, and more.
The arresting photograph at the top of this newsletter is the work of Chicago-based photographer Alejandra Guerrero, who you may know as Corporate Vampire. Originally from Bogota, Colombia, she says of her erotic images: “I like making women look and feel amazing in photos. There is zero misogyny in my work; I’m all about empowerment via sexuality.” Follow her here.
Later this month in London, the Tate Modern will debut “Leigh Bowery!” The life of the outrageous performance artist, club promoter, and fashion designer will be celebrated through looks and images that reveal how the icon “reimagined clothing and makeup as forms of painting and sculpture, tested the limits of decorum, and celebrated the body as a shape-shifting tool with the power to challenge norms of aesthetics, sexuality and gender.”
In her new video, “High Fashion,” Addison Rae, the Britney Spears of our time, demonstrates a beignet fetish. Or maybe it’s a metaphor for cocaine.
I’m a longtime fan of The White Lotus creator Mike White, who Kelefa Sanneh profiles in The New Yorker. Notoriously, White’s oeuvre is populated by perverts and perversions. Here, Sanneh proposes “the pervert test.” It’s like the Bechdel test but is a measure of representations of race instead of gender.
“Whenever I see a nonwhite character onscreen, I find myself wondering, Could this character possibly be a pervert? Or at any rate a creep, a brute, a charlatan, a narcissist, a villain? Or will this character turn out to be drearily decent, possessed of no serious flaws except those which can be justified by the character’s backstory or by the flaws of society?”
Does this quilt look like a vagina to you?
This week I’m reading Alan Moore’s 1982 The Saga of the Swamp Thing #1. The comic book includes an eerily prescient envisioning of the future of digital pornography, and it is blue, shimmering, and handheld.
All Fours, the sex-addled novel by filmmaker and Instagram gyrator Miranda July that every middle-aged woman you know has read, will be adapted into a TV series by Starz. It’s not HBO, but, oh, well.
Purportedly, customers are stealing strippers’ clothes at the Palomino Club in Las Vegas. “A high quality thong can cost $150,” reports Vital Vegas.
Check out Renegades by Chloe Sherman. Shot on film, these photos document “the thriving lesbian subculture in ’90s San Francisco” as “A new wave of feminism embraced gender fluidity, and butch/femme culture flourished.”
Zillow Gone Wild has another sex house listing. This one is a property for swingers in Tempe, Arizona. (See: the upside down pineapple decor.)
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Susannah Breslin is a freelance journalist; the author of a memoir, Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment, and a short story collection, You’re a Bad Man, Aren’t You?; and the founder of The Fixer, a strategic communications consultancy. Follow her online on X, Instagram, Facebook, Bluesky, and Threads. Contact her here. She lives in Los Angeles.