Freckled and Ruined and Gorgeous

There’s a specific kind of celebrity who functions like a bad habit—you know the track record, the evidence is extensive, and you keep going back anyway. Lindsay Lohan, late 2009, was exactly that for me. I’d written her off several times by this point, and then she did something to remind me why I’d ever cared.

This was one of those times. Photographer Yu Tsai shot her for Muse magazine in a session that didn’t leave much to the imagination—the Herbie: Fully Loaded girl staging a threesome for a fashion shoot, lascivious and clearly in on the joke. Something about it felt defiant. The press had been treating her as a cautionary tale for years, staging her downfall in weekly installments, and here she was looking better than she had any right to, not apologizing for anything, simulating sex acts with the calm of someone who’s decided they’re done being managed.

She’d taken her clothes off before—for various lenses, various contexts, with varying degrees of intention. The Muse shoot felt different. Controlled. Her decision. That distinction matters more than it probably should.

I don’t have an objective position on Lindsay Lohan. She’s freckled and chaotic and gorgeous, and I’ve had a thing for her since Mean Girls that no amount of tabloid grimness has fully extinguished. The Muse shoot didn’t help with that. Good.