Kristen Stewart has a message for people who hate her Rolling Stone cover
The Love Lies Bleeding actor was a guest on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert this week
In January, Jeremy Allen White sent the internet (and a couple of out-of-line red carpet interviewers) into a full-blown tizzy when he appeared in naught but his tighty-whities for Calvin Klein’s spring campaign. In November, Barry Keoghan took off even more for the final scene in Saltburn. Those two got billboards in New York City and dirty bathwater-scented candles, not to mention widespread thirst and adoration. But when Kristen Stewart put her hand down her jockstrap for Rolling Stone’s March cover, she got a whole string of vitriol from all the usual sources. (We won’t link any of it here because it’s gross, but you can read it for yourself in RS’ excellently titled, “Right-Wingers Are Terrified of Our Gay Kristen Stewart Cover.”) Can you spot the difference?
Earlier this week, Stewart went on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, during which the host revealed that CBS actually asked him not to show the offending cover on air. He went rogue and did anyway, joking with Stewart that she “look[s] better in a jockstrap than [he] ever did.”
Getting into the more serious side of things, Stewart called the backlash “a little ironic because I feel like I’ve seen a lot of male pubic hair on the cover of things.” “I’ve seen a lot of hands in pants and like, unbuttoned,” she continued. “I think there’s a certain overt acknowledgment of a female sexuality that has its own volition in a way that is annoying for people who are sexist and homophobic.”
“It’s not remotely explicit,” she added. “Female sexuality isn’t supposed to actually want anything but to be had. And that feels like it’s protruding in a way that might be annoying.”
Stewart has clearly thought about this a lot. In her most recent film, Love Lies Bleeding from director Rose Glass, the actor plays a stuck-in-a-rut gym owner who shares a number of sultry scenes with a vivacious bodybuilder (played by Katy O’Brian) that would probably piss conservatives off in a similar way were they to ever actually see it. (The film is playing in theaters now.) “It’s more like a power play, and an exchange and a particular physical response to touch and to verbiage that is so exacting that it feels real,” Stewart said of the direction behind the film’s sex scenes (via IndieWire). “It’s just that it’s so detail-oriented, like, the physicality, the orifice, the actual opening of a woman is acknowledged and talked about, and it’s not seen, but it is felt, and it is really fucking satisfying. Because that is so rare.”
Take that, right-wingers! Or as Stewart perfectly summarized on The Late Show, “fuck you… but I never will!”