Image of the Week #1 Kristen Stewart for Rolling Stone, by Adam Lehrer
In this new column, Adam identifies the images of the internet rife with loaded and contradictory content/meaning
Kristen Stewart never quite hacked it as a “hot girl” in the American Apparel, Pornhubified manner that we now identify the concept with. Her facial structure is too angular, even masculine from certain angles. While she’s thin and seemingly in good physical condition, she doesn’t have an erotic flow to her body. No tits or ass or small waist or Dua Lipa camel toe to attach the male gaze to.
That said, it’d be hard to make the case that she isn’t a striking or beautiful woman. It’s always been a disconnect between fashion images and male consumers: fashion is a homosexual run industry. What the fag big wigs find beautiful about women is purely aesthetic; it has no impetus in the biological imperative. As Louis CK once joked, “When you’re staring at a nice pair of tits, it’s actually your body telling you ‘man, those tits would feed my child so well,’” and Kristen Stewart just doesn’t exude the kind of primal masturbatory energy that other actresses often do.
How ironic it is then that Stewart seems to look hottest beneath the gaze of dyke art fashion photographer Collier Schorr? Schorr’s work has always been interesting to me. It’s highly phallically envious. It objectifies women no less than Terry Richardson’s ever did, but alas – Schorr cannot cum on her subjects or badger them to jerk her big dick off because there is no dick present. Alas, there’s something very “big dick energy” about Schorr all the same. A tousle of thick hair, workwear, denim and boots. She’s tall, too. She’s quite on the masculine end of lesbians, but is far too sleek and obsessed with beauty to be anything remotely like the butchies of the Lilith Fair. One almost wonders if she fashioned her entire image upon the late Robert Mapplethorpe. You look at her 501s in photos almost looking for the imprint of the big prick. What to call this? “Ghost dick energy?” Yes, that works. She also photographs women very similar to the way that Mapplethorpe did men, which is to say – lustfully.
Promoting her new film Love Lies Bleeding, in which Stewart plays a gym manager with a criminal dad who falls in love with a female bodybuilder (yeah, I’m going to see this shit,) Stewart is photographed by Schorr for the cover of Rolling Stone, otherwise the worst magazine on the planet (but that’s neither here nor there.) In the image, Stewart is wearing a leather vest and jock strap. Her haircut is almost identical to mine: the retrograde, ‘80s white trash male mullet. Stewart places her hand into the jockstrap like a male athlete scratches his balls. But alas, this is all double entendre. Stewart doesn’t have balls, she has what is likely a tight pussy. She’s literally playing with her pussy. It’s a pornographic image, but one that is encoded in maleness and thus averting male lust. But the image is full of lust still.
Whose lust? Gay men drawn to a certain male kitsch. Women that like athletes. And, to be sure, lesbians that have a little oil in their tanks. And honestly, I’m here for it. Lesbians sometimes seem as if they’ve gone extinct – wiped out by the autogynephiles who pantomime them. Schorr then turns Stewart into a contemporary dyke sex symbol – a totem to the horny dyke gaze. Would Rolling Stone allow a straight, male photographer to capture Kristen Stewart fingering herself? It’s highly unlikely, screechy puritans that they’ve become. Schorr then seizes upon the moment, approaches her lust with cocksure attitude and stakes her claim as the Ghost Dick King of dyke eroticism .