THE LOOK IS STRIKING. No one else on this Earth quite resembles Cicciolina. There is a natural beauty, but what truly imbues her with a distinct, otherworldly appeal is her eccentric, idiosyncratic sense of style and flair. The make-up can be stark: blue eye shadow and deep, cherry-red lipstick. The eyebrows—dark, line-straight, and prominent—contrast with platinum-white hair. The wardrobe is strange and ethereal: a crown of flowers set upon the head; elbow-length gloves in angelic, virginal white; a toy doll clasped often in hand. Cicciolina’s is a purposefully curated look, designed to impress all those who see it. It makes her memorable. As Chase Lombardo, the drummer for the art collective cumgirl8, put it to me on a call recently, “Somebody once said something like, ‘If you’re trying to be a [public] figure or to make a wave, you should be able to be drawn easily.’ She nailed that.”
Cicciolina is an artist of many stripes: a porn star; an Italo disco performer; a muse to others; a socialite; a progressive politician who, in the 1990s, sat in the Italian parliament. Her influence is unique and long-lasting—cumgirl8 are so enamored with her that, a couple of years ago, they released a single bearing her name. The reason for their admiration is clear enough: cumgirl8 are loud, lewd, hot, colorful, political, smart, and funny—and Cicciolina, thus, is the perfect idol. She is, as the band put it in an Instagram post celebrating their hero’s birthday a little while back, the original cumgirl: cumgirl#1.
Born Ilona Staller in 1951, the woman who would, one day, become Cicciolina grew up in Communist Hungary, learning the skills of art and performance that would, in later life, stand her in good stead. She played the violin and the piano. She became a skilled chess player. She danced ballet and modern styles, and, while she was still young, she started modeling. Her beauty brought her attention, and, even as she learned these other skills, she realized the power her allure held over people. “I found that people did not want to see me in concerts, playing the violin or the pianoforte,” she remarked in a Vanity Fair profile in 1991. “They wanted to see me nude.”
Staller’s beauty, according to reports, caught the attention of Hungary’s secret services, so, when she was 18, she was apparently recruited to seduce and spy on foreigners, meaning, in addition to porn star, musician, and politician, we can also add Cold War spy to her resumé. Those days didn’t last for terribly long, and, soon she met and married an Italian man, meaning she could leave Hungary and make for his homeland. The marriage was short-lived, but it succeeded in bringing Staller to Italy, the place where she would make her name as Cicciolina.
IT BEGAN WITH A RADIO SHOW. Staller, after meeting a famous pornographer, started hosting a program in 1973 called Voulez-Vous Coucher Avec Moi?—in English, Will You Sleep With Me? The premise was that horny folk would call in and Staller would talk dirty to them on air, eventually coming to refer to them as cicciolini—vaguely, “little chubby ones,” though there isn’t an elegant English translation. Noting how the phrase dutifully described her own pussy, she eventually started referring to herself that way, too: La Cicciolina was born.
Cicciolina’s star quickly outgrew the radio studio, and, eventually, she was beginning to appear on Italian TV, stretching the limits of what was deemed acceptable in what was, at the time, still a fiercely Catholic and conservative country. Cicciolina was apparently the first woman to appear topless on Italian TV, and, soon, she was beginning to appear in softcore porn movies, followed by some very hardcore films indeed. She performed on stage, too, singing and dancing and seducing, and she was, in a true sense, a multi-faceted artist paying little heed to boundaries.
I first encountered Cicciolina through a series of reissues the Italian record label Cinedelic released a couple of years ago. Some of Cicciolina’s music, as well as that of her late friend and fellow porn star Moanna Pozzi, was repackaged and released by Cinedelic, presented with album sleeves I’ll describe modestly as eye-catching. The songs of both Cicciolina and Moanna are camp and colorful, and, if they’re not the greatest tunes to ever grace our world, they are, certainly, fun and saucy. Italo is a weird style of music and, when brought to listeners via ethereal, sultry porn stars, that fact is made entirely plain. Cicciolina’s catalog, in particular, opens up a strange world, nearly childish if not for the fact she sings in celebration of good dick and may, at any moment, unexpectedly begin to simulate the sound of an orgasm.
Let’s add a content warning here, bearing down over this next section of the article: There is some absolute filth that is about to be reproduced. I don’t speak Italian, so please excuse the fact that I’m using Google Translate to help me present, in English, some of the lyrics of Cicciolina’s song “Muscolo Rosso.” There will surely be nuance lost in the translation. But, on the other hand, this does not seem to be a song that aspires to much in the way of subtlety. I suspect that what we get here from Google probably captures the truest essence of the song.
“You, who look like a mannequin
Bring out your hard cock
I’ll give you a blowjob
I’ll give you a blowjob, oh
I want the cock
Dressed in leather
The cock
Harder than the wall
The cock
In the asshole
The cock that will break me, ah
Together with me it will squirt”
Now, then. I’m personally minded to think that’s fucking hilarious, but, predictably enough, the Italian censors of the day weren’t terribly pleased. The song was banned in Italy, but it did manage to sneak abroad to find its audience. “Muscolo Rosso” became something of a hit in—where else?—France, a land at ease with itself, happily embracing taboo and sex in its popular culture.
I reached out to Staller herself recently, hoping to get the chance to speak with her about her life, but, because English isn’t her first language, it was agreed that an email exchange would be best. This is, naturally, an imperfect way to communicate, and her responses can consequently feel a bit stilted. But, given the situation, it had to suffice. When I asked her about her music career, she wrote back, “I love music because it provides great vital energy, and when we sing, we don’t think about the world’s problems.”
I spend most of my own working days reading and writing about the deathly, degraded, soul-breaking state of our contemporary politics, and, indeed, music does offer me respite, so I appreciate her point here. Staller, beneath the color and bombast of her artistic career, is a switched-on, fiercely political person who does feel the weight of the world’s problems, so I believe her when she says music is a source of vital energy that helps her to, for a moment, let go. But what I find especially interesting about her is the extent to which her art and her politics merge. Take any single strand of her career away—the porn, the music, the politics—and she ceases to be Cicciolina in her grandest form. Her pursuits, from the absurd to the sexy to the deadly serious, bleed into and feed one another. And, living during a time when the left is weak, shell-shocked, and frankly a bit gray, I find that admirable.
IN 1987, IN A MOVE widely perceived at the time as a publicity stunt, Cicciolina stood on behalf of Italy’s Radical Party in the country’s parliamentary election, running a campaign that, naturally, featured stripteases, flashing her tits, and performances with her pet snake. It was… novel, but it worked. She won her local election, meaning that now, not only was she an active porn star, but she was also a member of the Italian parliament. It was an ostentatious development and, ever the show woman, she incorporated her beauty and her sexuality into her way of doing politics, making fun of the grossly male-dominated political scene in Italy and, at one point, offering to fuck Saddam Hussein if it meant ending the Gulf War. It was, at times, silly and over the top, but, underlying it all, was an entirely serious commitment to progressive politics.
“I stand for peace and love among peoples,” Staller told me in her email. “Whether left or right, people should be happy, and poverty should not exist. There is definitely a great inequality between the rich and the poor, which should no longer be a reality.”
Some of Cicciolina’s ideas and policy proposals were radically ahead of her time and remain ahead of our own reactionary moment. Sex, predictably enough, was a big concern, leading her to advocate for sexual education in schools, the rights of the incarcerated to have sex, the legalization of sex work, and for the establishment of “love parks,” where young people living at home could visit to fuck without the possibility of their parents interrupting. The environment, too, was especially high up on her list of concerns, which, all these decades later, comes across as profoundly prescient. “My love for nature led me, as a politician, to propose an ecological tax on cars to reduce the damage caused by smog,” she explained to me. “I protested for the protection of endangered animals, the defense of their natural habitat, and the abolition of vivisection. I was against nuclear energy—my slogan was: ‘Let’s take a stand with the sun and love, no to nuclear energy.’”
This sort of stuff would be declared dangerous leftist lunacy nowadays in this Trump-driven world, but Cicciolina was pursuing it years ago, in a world arguably more conservative—if less outright batshit insane—than our own. These were brave, insightful principles that she was fighting for, which does, grimly, make her opinion of the present-day president all the more disappointing. I read somewhere a while back that she was supportive of Trump during the last election, so I asked her about that—again, it would have been better to speak in person about this, but, alas, that couldn’t happen. “During Donald J. Trump’s election campaign,” she wrote in the email, “I supported him because he said he wanted to bring peace to the world. I find him to be a very charismatic president who cares about the fate of people.”
This is disappointing, if not altogether surprising. Trump, no matter which way you look at him, is a subversive figure and, in a political system for so long dominated by centrist bores who do cruelty without flourishes in their presentation, subversion can feel satisfying unto itself, especially for people who prefer to row against the mainstream anyway. In our rejection of a corrupted, war-mongering political establishment, it can feel tempting to accept anyone who loudly stands in opposition to it. But it is hopelessly naive to believe in someone like Trump. It is true he spoke out against war in the campaign, but, sure enough, he now allows Israel to further annex the West Bank and to bombard Gaza at will, planning fancifully ahead for a complete ethnic cleansing of the region. He belittles Ukraine and seeks an end to the war only on his own terms, without the least bit of care for the people of that country who have actually fought. The man, remember, literally talks openly about annexing his allies. To imagine he is a peace president is plainly ridiculous. For someone like Cicciolina, who has done more than most to further genuinely radical, progressive causes throughout her life, it is unacceptable.
But, that does not mean we disregard the woman or her legacy. People can be right about some things and terribly wrong about others and, while I have no sympathy for anyone who thinks of Trump as a potential force for good, Cicciolina has, in her own, sparkly way, been a novel force for good over the years. And, ironically, her way of pursuing progressive politics may hold some secrets as to how we can overcome figures like Trump. His strangeness, and his disregard for norms has, despite the hopes of liberals, never harmed his appeal—on the contrary, it has only ever bolstered it: The man knows how to surprise and entertain people, whereas the left has largely lost that skill and the center never had it to begin with. There is a strange, countercultural energy around the far right these days, and it is the duty of the left to reclaim it. People like Cicciolina, imperfect as they may be, can offer a blueprint.
“Especially in America,” Lombardo says, “the left—it’s like we’re not shaking the boat. We’re going by the book and trying to honor the rules, but the rules aren’t serving us anymore. In an effort to be reformative through alienation and cancel culture, we’ve actually ended up putting ourselves in a weird non-humanistic place, where we’re so scared of offending people that we’ve rendered ourselves inactive.”
This is not a call for every democracy-loving, left-leaning radical to become a porn star in order to pursue a radical agenda. But, in a looser sense, maybe it is a suggestion that we need to rediscover fun in our politics. Cicciolina was outrageous and smart and hot and extremely funny, and, at least for a while in Italian politics, that served her and her progressive agenda well. She knew how to play the game in her own way. “She’s well aware of the feminine,” Lombardo adds. “This way to present herself that kind of makes men—not feel intimidated, but she just, kind of, steers the ship from the back seat. She’s brilliant. She’s a very, very smart woman. I want to leave on that. Don’t forget that this is a very, very smart woman.”
Following her term in office, Cicciolina failed to secure another electoral win, but she did, in 1991, co-found the Love Party alongside her friend and ally Moanna Pozzi, who died only three years later. Her political career has never since returned to the height of the late ’80s and early ’90s, but she does claim to still be active today—telling me, in her email, that she continues to speak to former colleagues and associates in Italy’s political scene. She is in her 70s now, appearing, from time to time, on reality TV shows and performing in clubs. She recently released an autobiographical photobook, Memorie, and is apparently working on a film about her life, which, if it comes to fruition, may serve to cement her legend into the foreseeable future. That, it seems, is her hope. “I feel immortal,” she wrote in her email, “because my life story and work will remain in history even after my death.”
