Alexandra Rubinstein
Alexandra Rubinstein’s a painter from Brooklyn who decided to paint male celebrities giving head, with thought-bubble captions about what they’re thinking while they do it. Leonardo DiCaprio: What’s Gilbert Grape Eating?
Drake: Best I Ever Had!
Beckham: Eat It Like Beckham.
Justin Bieber: Is It Too Late Now?
—which is perfect because you can feel the desperation in that one, some pathetic maybe-this-fixes-it energy.
She started doing this because there’s basically no pornography made for women. The entire industry assumes its audience and doesn’t bother—billions of dollars built on the idea that nobody wants to watch men work. Rubinstein painted it instead.
What strikes me is how funny the titles are and how true they are at the same time. Drake thinking his own lyrics while going down on someone. Bieber with that damaged-goods energy. The stupid things that would actually be running through male celebrities’ heads in that moment. Regular porn would never touch this because it’s not built to think about female pleasure as even a visible thing—it’s built for someone else entirely.
She didn’t write an essay about the gap or ask permission. She just made the thing that should exist.