The Legend of Cicciolina: Porn Star, Disco Diva, and Radical Member of Parliament
At various points in time a spy, a world-famous porn star, an Italo disco diva, and a radical left-wing politician, Ilona Staller, aka Cicciolina, has lived quite the life.
Photos courtesy of Cinedelic
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.