Cassidy Ott. Please Don’t Eat the Roadkill!, 2025
acrylic on canvas
64 ½ inches x 64 ½ inches
Courtesy of the artist and No Instructions Gallery
Please do not under any circumstances ingest roadkill, even if the roadkill has rocking hot tits, a tiny waist, and a big fat ass. The roadkill may be super mega sexy, however the taste of burned rubber has permeated the organism’s epidermis, ensuring a bitter taste for any hitchhiker bold enough to attempt consumption.
Desperation / Relinquish / Helpless / I hate new car smell / Acceptance Stage
by Matt Morris
“I’ve taken elements of my personality and blown them up entirely, exaggerated them because it helps me to have this powerful character I can come to when I need a confidence boost. I just tap into that character, and it helps me to feel like I’m completely capable and sure of myself, and deserving of my success and opportunities…I have some other alter egos who help me deal with other aspects of my life.”
–Ashnikko in a 2021 interview with Forbes
Here at the interstices of patriarchy, capitalism, and megalomaniacal Americentrism, times are difficult for women. But when have gendered distinctions made things manageable for the subordinated categories that are produced? Structural power relations have never granted the feminine in even its most expansive definitions a fair shake. This particular beleaguered moment is overloading our nervous systems with despot-second-term-pussy-grabber-Epstein-files-redaction-Quiet-Piggy body horror nightmares with cameo appearances of Pam Bondi blatantly ignoring sexual assault survivors, “trad wives” and the Bible colleges that train them, and a mob of nearly 800 anti-trans bills under review this year in the United States (and the ways these far right sentiments are mirrored elsewhere worldwide). In a reckoning marked as much by desperation as tactical transmutation, artists, musicians, filmmakers, and a multiplicity of womanhood are working into and through the dissociative consciousness-splitting provoked by the machinations of misogynistic culture. In just the past year, painter Cassidy Ott, pop musicians like Slayyyter and Ashnikko, and films from the likes of auteur Maggie Gyllenhaal have been exploring the possibilities of alter egos—variously monstrous, stereotypical, and capricious.
These experiments in empowerment were augured in earlier eras of starkly conservative crackdowns. Smack in the middle of the firestorm that was the Reagan administration, Tina Turner took the form of Aunty Entity in 1984 for the post-apocalyptic sci-fi film Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, and in her accompanying single sang, “We don’t need another hero.” Actually, we did then, and thankfully, powerful female role models like Ms. Tina Turner herself appeared to take a stand against oppressive power systems—in her case, surviving years of domestic abuse, weathering the paternalism of her field and the racism of the world she traveled through, and eventually relinquishing her US citizenship to live as a committed Buddhist in Switzerland. And in these troubled times today, our need for heroes is yielding a phantasia of female alterity transfigured into forms of resistance, monstrosity, and strategic moral deviance in a battle for the very thinkability of autonomous agency for women in the dystopic twenty-first century where we find ourselves.
Niki de Saint Phalle. My love where shall we make love?
and My love where shall we meet again?, c. 1969
color screenprint on wove paper, from a suite of nine
variable dimensions
©️ Niki de Saint Phalle. Courtesy of the artist and Salon 94.
A few semesters back, I was facilitating an open studio undergraduate course, conducting one-on-one meetings with students about their self-directed art projects. One precocious bricoleuse said to me, “I think I want to make work about bimbos.” I admitted that it felt like it had been at least twenty years since I’d heard anyone use the word and wondered what it meant to her. She said that men are terrified of the bimbo, scared of how much they pine after her, scared of how she resists their control. She described younger women reappropriating the bimbo in much the same manner as queer people in my generation laid hold of ‘dyke’ and ‘fag,’ and that it denoted a woman being hyper-feminine but messy, unpredictable, demanding, desirable. The student was a bellwether for me, for in the following months and years, I’ve noted a widespread next-gen ‘bimbo-ification’ across Internet culture, pop music, drag, comic art, sexual fetish, and eventually politics in the mainstream.
Fantasy is, perhaps, the starting place for political, social, and sexual counternarrative—as activist an endeavor as protest marches and Molotov cocktails. Condensed into an agent of change, fantasy is rendered as an avatar—an alter ego in costume balls, online forums, video games, kink communities, and survivalist code-switching in advanced stage capitalism who is equipped with wish-images, superpowers, and uncanny extremes that breach limits and preconceptions, allowing for id-induced playfulness-cum-revolt.
Given the always already unsteadiness of art’s intershuffling of representation and real, it’s no wonder that in a century marred by world wars, expanded empires, and industry-stoked ecological meltdown, artists would enact and draw and paint avatars who could navigate their own foibles and fictions. After Marcel Duchamp’s defection to the United States during World War I, he developed a female alter ego named Rrose Sélavy who existed in photographic portraits made with Man Ray, as a brand ambassador for a non-existent perfume, and as a fictive author of a number of conceptual artworks produced during the 1920s. By the interwar period, the impulse toward pluralist personae raced into every direction of art, literature, media, and pop culture—among those burgeoning tactics, women like Tarpé Mills, Gladys Parker, and, a few decades on, Cathy Guisewite developed comic strips starring characters distinguished only by degrees from themselves. Not exactly autobiographical, Mills’ Miss Fury, Parker’s Flapper Fanny, and Cathy Guisewite’s Cathy were experimental incarnations that blended fantasy and reality on the comic’s page.
In these times, the ‘another hero’ we need is unequivocally a shero: she appears from between pages of comics, frames of VFX televisual candy, spinning on the vinyl of queer nightlife, and spilling from the indulgently decadent missives of contemporary painting as a transposition of restless, fragmented feminine signifiers that refuse to organize monolithically or behave moralistically. What in yesteryear began as secret identities for superheroines like Lynda Carter’s spinning firework transformation into Wonder Woman on the eponymous TV show in the mid-1970s (and the re-re-re-iteration of that transformation sequence in Dara Birnbaum’s famous Technology/Transformation video artwork a few years later has mutated in the rhetoric of its outrage, skewing more and more toward paranormal, outright monstrosity in the construction of alternate, more liberatory social outcomes. The hissing refusals of Elsa Lanchester in the 1935 Bride of Frankenstein (directed by notable queer James Whale) anticipated a rogues’ gallery of monster women with more or less explicit feminist agendas, among them Karyn Kusama’s Jennifer’s Body, 2009; Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, 2024; and Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride!, 2026, which reincarnates the Bride of Frankenstein nearly a century on in an experimental vaudevillian noir thriller haunted by the specter of Mary Shelley herself.
Here there be monsters, but key to the movement is an appreciation of how the monstrous serves to taxonomize the non-normative vis-a-vis the dominant social order. Whatever is unknown, other, queer gets framed as monstrous, garnering abject disavowal and alienation. Women become monstrous to the patriarchy when they—we—are educated and enterprising, when they age, when they couple with other women, when they demonstrate interiority, emote, menstruate, when they dress for themselves, when they vote, when they desire. Bimbos present a particular and present danger, as blonde bombshells, balloon boobies, manic pixie dreamers, video hos, streetwalkers, and bad girls are wrested away from porno search terms in male-gaze pipe dreams. The bimbo as an archetype emerges out of the sexual revolution and women’s liberation movements from the constraints of post-war suburban domesticity into a culture of oral contraceptives, abortion access, and progressive shifts in fashion, the workforce, and how the lives of celebrities and public figures were reported. The advent of Barbie and other dollifications of adult womanhood complicated the longstanding conventions of baby dolls (and women as objects and property), and was followed by a decade that saw increased legal protections for nudity and pornography: the consumption of women is a crucial precursor for the bimbo, composited from sex dolls and mudflap pinup ladies, franchises like Girls Gone Wild and Baywatch, and the aesthetic progeny of Anna Nicole Smith. The allure of Lana Del Rey’s vapid provocations, the raw destructive potential of Bridezillas, and a veritable phalanx of Real Housewives populate a complex field of desire and action into which the bimbo re-emerges.
The bimbo may seem like an unlikely liberator, mostly because she has typically bypassed liberation in favor of the artificial flavors of spontaneity, outrageousness, and debauchery for the amusement of male spectators. But the redirection of her exaggerated features toward vapid critiques of status quo social orders, her own self-possessed coquettish misandry, and, most of all, misbehavior with intent yields productive upsets to structural power relations.
This reprisal of bimbo can be found bursting forth in undulating piles of hot pink limbs, boob jobs, and gnashing teeth in Cassidy Ott’s newest paintings, which were on view in her solo exhibition Back By Popular Demand! at No Instructions Gallery in Milwaukee, WI, through May 29th. Each acrylic on canvas painting—ranging from the scale of centerfold to marquee signage—roils with the antics of Sharkie, a rose-tinted cryptid that might be spotted on a tabloid in the gyno waiting room in a Celeste Rapone painting. And in excess of each painting’s imagery, accompanying wall texts experiment with the didactic in the expanded field, reading like diaristic excerpts, sissy rap lyrics, and scratchpad brainstorming annotations.
Sharkie is what happens if Marvel’s Venom symbiote crashed to earth and melded with an aspiring party girl instead of the usual fare of superhero dude characters. A series of high camp tableau—backyard cookout, pool party, casino, and carpeted dens hung with Playboy posters—serve as backdrops for a fluorescent magenta anti-heroine possessed of Loony Toons morphology, adjacent to mythologic chimerical creatures, gorgons, and harpies. Undulating around the central character, what appears to be her tongue released from between pointed lines of teeth spirals to the edges of the composition in a chutes-and-ladders maze of glossolalic oral fixation. Sharkie’s adventures zigzag between base instinct and impulse control, with wide, wet black eyes peering with maximum anxiety and stimulation. Sharkie is to Keith Haring’s dog motif what the Wimmen’s Comix were to R. Crumb: high femme rebuttals to cartoon mainstays, mispronounced into troubled entanglements spread across psychic life, consumer culture, and convulsive biopolitics. In a limited edition comic zine that Ott produced in conjunction with her exhibition of paintings, the artist joins up to the traditions of women and their avatars in comics aforementioned, staging Sharkie to share backstories to some of the paintings on view, examine the contours of vulgar sentiments, recount nightmares, meditate on zen pronouncements, and speculate on existential musings like, “I wonder if that’s how men feel.”
Ott typically depicts Sharkie with hourglass curves and high gloss, buxom tits juxtaposed with the character’s creature-feature head, lolling mouth agape. At other times, Sharkie extends Stretch Armstrong-style as an unruly “body without organs.” Just as often enough, Sharkie presents with ‘weird lil’ guy’ affect, standing with stiff awkwardness and compromised self-confidence. Thongs, bikinis, and novelty t-shirts costume these doodles-come-alive. Sharkie serves as an avatar, perhaps as much for viewers as for the painter herself, running simulations and reliving permutations on memory to examine the effects on a rubberized, changeling body whose resilience one might aspire to. Sharkie can overextend, misstep, incite mayhem, and indulge in recklessness within the virtual field of her pop-art postcard environs.
Cassidy Ott. HUBBA HUBBA BUBBA, 2026
acrylic on canvas
24″ x 18″
Courtesy of the artist and No Instructions Gallery
HUBBA HUBBA now THOSE are some BUBBLES babygirl! Saccharine webbing sprawled between your teeth, get you a bubblegum facial. Blow me next! Blow me next!
Chalky sweet / sticky sticky sticky / HUBBA BUBBA Bubble Tape™ / Tickle Me Elmo / Calvin Klein™ / Desperation
In HUBBA HUBBA BUBBA, 2026, Sharkie wears Calvin Klein underwear seated on a shag carpet before a Playboy poster. Her sharp pointed, harlot red mani/pedi presents as a day of self-care, but we encounter her (and her Elmo plush toy) in a lurid disaster, succumbing to suggestive strings and globs of sticky chewing gum. Webs of gum are enmeshed across the character’s open mouth, with long tendrils of the stuff running down to her bare feet. BBWQ, 2025, is considerably more violent in its implications, with a voluptuous, scantily clad Sharkie kneeling while another pink figure charcoal grills a section of her tongue. These paintings are pantomime melodramas, writhing between the possibilities that Sharkie can’t speak or else won’t. For all their comical hyperbole, Ott depicts an eschatology veering from trauma toward nihilism, employing clownish extra-human slapstick to conduct a showdown discourse on endgame gender politics. Central to the conflicts each scene spectacularizes is a crisis at the threshold of speech: the girthy muscularity of Sharkie’s extended tongue may be an instrument for expressing pent-up female fury, but the outcome always appears to hang in suspense, could as easily deteriorate into a joke about fellatio. Sharkie is repeatedly subjected to crucibles of rape culture, impossible beauty standards, economic precariousness, mania, and exhaustion. In Ott’s sugar-rush palettes and carnivalesque depictions, her protagonist/s survive in protracted ambiguities, oscillating between empowerment and compromises, gratification and debasement, pleasure and suffering. Across the painted episodes on view, I remembered a couple of sentences from an interview with scholar Andrea Long Chu: “Everyone should be allowed to want things that are bad for them. I think I’m prepared to defend that statement at least.”
Cassidy Ott. BBWQ, 2025
acrylic on canvas
37″ x 31″
Courtesy of the artist and No Instructions Gallery
Big Beautiful Woman seeks MMM (Manly Male Man) to slather her in barbeque sauce and roast her alive. What good is a pair of big hot bouncy tits if you can’t chew and digest them. BBQ sauce must be from artisan local saucery, none of that Kirkland shit. Serious Inquiries Only.
Sex / Insecurity / Self perception / Objectification / Soot / In Between Stages
It matters, too, that the Sharkie alt-reality is a painted one. The formal conventions of painting operate doubly as emotional metaphor, with the edges of the canvas rectangle compressing their contents like a pressure-cooker. Episodes of near pictorial flatness bend into forced perspectives redolent of Fra Angelico, traced out in hire-wire color clashes that build into neo-Fauve cacophonies like those found in paintings by Elizabeth Murray or Katherine Bernhardt. Enlarging the scope of the flat, milky qualities found in hand-painted cel animation, Ott gets playful with the trappings of the commercial arts, staging linguistic arcades and panoplies of logos and signs around her thotty pink creatures that string together memes, witticisms, and branding, presented as self-deprecating humor and art historical puns. Ott and her Sharkie both might have been birthed from Niki de Saint Phalle’s HON – en katedral (SHE – a cathedral), 1966, an early behemoth mother-monster crafted by an artist who had worked as a fashion model, gained notoriety for firing guns at paintings while wearing a superhero-esque white body suit, and created visionary successions of whimsical women characters variously erotic, ecstatic, and melancholic. Sharkie’s appendages look as if they have squirmed their way into being the suggestive squiggles of Sue Williams’ paintings—permuting the sexy-smart liveliness of drawing, doodling, and daydreaming into approaches to painting that build upon a half-century of breakthroughs in redefining womanhood per se.
Gladys Nilsson. Spark, 2023
Watercolor, gouache, graphite, colored pencil, ink, and crayon on paper
40 ¼ inches x 60 ¼ inches
© Gladys Nilsson. Courtesy of the artist, Garth Greenan Gallery, New York, and Parker Gallery, Los Angeles.
The Ott-Sharkie dynamic joins up with a dynasty of fantasists who have painted their ways toward freedom: quasi-surrealists like Frida Kahlo, Florine Stettheimer, and Gertrude Abercrombie, along with latter day role players like Hilary Harkness, Gladys Nilsson, and Chitra Ganesh. Ott’s Chicago training follows traditions of the Imagists and Hairy Who? with whom Nilsson in particular has long been affiliated: her milieu approached painting inventively, playing with sensibilities smuggled from comics, cartoons, and advertising. These inquiries take on a glaze of sly wit when wielded by Nilsson and her successors—Ott among them; tragicomic melodramas of gender politics serve as central plots in an irreverent storytelling for which Chicago painters have been celebrated for generations.
This Janus intellect of reinforcing silliness with intercitationality may be one of the central hallmarks of the liberated and liberatory bimbo avatar: within the wider culture, the performance of vacant, seductive temptress is backed by a hyper-literate referentiality, the knowing irony of a fully embodied mastermind. In the nomenclature of today’s Internet, youth, and fashion cultures, something like Marilyn Monroe’s “smart dumb blonde” is revisited with the scholarly precision of a drag queen replete with her pantheon of divas. The avatar is very much an assemblage, a rag doll, and Shelley’s monster—perhaps nowhere more legible than in pop music advancements in recent years by women, queer, and nonbinary musicians who configure highly annotated surveys of women rockers and pop mavens of the 80s, 90s, and aughts into fully immersive fantasies.
Aidan Hicks. Slayyyter, Summit Music Hall, Denver, CO, 2023
http://www.aidansvision.com.
In 2023, following the release of her album STARFUCKER, the American singer/songwriter Slayyyter, born Catherine Grace Garner, told Ira Madison III in an interview, “I have the Cathy side and I have the Slayyyter side of my personality, but I think they can both go hand in hand sometimes. The whole Slayyyter music project has given me a lot of confidence to be a little crazier. I think…some of the things I say in my music are ‘the real me,’ but it’s stuff I’m too afraid to say and act like in real life. So, I’m like, let me be a nasty whore in the music.” In the track “I Love NYC!” from STARFUCKER, the Slayyyter persona explicates some of the Jekyll/Hyde implications of the project, “Don’t bring Cathy, she’s a cunt. That bitch would embarrass us.” STARFUCKER and Slayyyter’s 2026 release WOR$T GIRL IN AMERICA are vertiginous assemblages of early Gaga with gestures lifted from Pat Benatar, Kesha, Madonna, Stevie Nicks, Blondie, and a kaleidoscopic plethora of po-mo, third-wave feminist facets. The connective tissue is a performative libertinism that contrasts more than extends from the lived reality of its actor.
Ashnikko. Credit: Vasso Vu, Warner Records.
Ashnikko, born Ashton Nicole Casey, is another pop musician who has literalized the shapeshifting precursors of Madonna, Beyoncé, and Britney into the alter-ego for which she has been known, along with what might be called sub-category personae, including Demidevil and Daisy. They have explained about their process, “Usually when I write all my songs I have this character that I have in mind, so this one is like this Daisy character, she’s like a vigilante and she kills rapists and she leaves behind daisies as a calling card.”
Casey’s Ashnikko’s Daisy advances the kinds of world-building possible through avatar fantasies like these.
More recently, Ashnikko has admitted, “I’m just tired of separating the two. It’s hard enough to find yourself, much less find yourself in two different roles.” And certainly in a globalized cultural economy where we are compelled to fashion ourselves into commodities, even our activity in email and social media is monetized, and we are all more or less consciously interfacing with the exposure of surveillance culture, FOMO rubbernecking, and the double-bind splitting that occurs with trying to know oneself from the outside through selfies, live feeds, and even face recognition security features, there are measurable material consequences for dislocating parts of a self into compartmentalizing personae. The ways fantasy and reality are demarcated—perhaps fallaciously treated as mutually exclusive—are really at the crux for tracing where desire resides, how longing matters and becomes matter.
Cassidy Ott. Operation / Throat Goat, 2026
acrylic on canvas
24″ x 18″
Courtesy of the artist and No Instructions Gallery
The ankle bone is connected to the knee bone, the knee bone is connected to some yummy slut with fat tits. Pluck the metal sigils from my supple tumid tum tum, make my flesh new. I’ll swallow up that funny bone if you put a bun in my oven.
Zzzt! / Shrapnel / Clown Surgery / Organ Map / Exploitation / Martyrdom
Viewing Cassidy Ott’s new exhibition of paintings, I was reminded of the monster bimbo alter egos that have been proliferated across recent years of music, film, and pop culture. But more than any other real-life figure, Sharkie’s expressions of anxiety and overwhelm, peering out above bouncing breasts akimbo brought to mind the recently leaked selfies and conversations Bryon Noem has had with a dominatrix named Shy Sotomayor. Bryon Noem is the husband of Kristi Noem, former governor of South Dakota and recently disgraced US Secretary of Homeland Security, whose policies have directed the violent, deadly, and unconstitutional policing of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) across the United States. In the images first distributed by The Daily Mail at the end of March 2026, Bryon Noem is shown wearing a set of enormous, flesh-colored, fake breasts and pink hot pants. The pert nipples point outward asymmetrically, and the stare above them is inscrutable, shiny with the light of whatever screen before which he was seated. The Daily Mail and other outlets have reported that in a nearly decade-long relationship with Sotomayor and other sex workers he’d contracted, Noem repeatedly fantasized variations on being a “trans bimbo slut” named Crystal—language and professions verified in texts and audio recordings Sotomayor saved from their interactions.
Bryon Noem’s recent publicity has been considered noteworthy primarily because of the far right wing, religious ideologies that he and his wife espouse. The hypocrisy and double standards are disappointing, but surely not surprising given the repressive impulses integral to these types of moral fascism. The story has remained fresh in my mind mostly because of the story itself, the ways reporting has tripped over its own anxieties and snap judgements, and the pathos that the dilemma of a bimbo fantasy strikes in me. Crossdressers and transgender people are not the same, obviously. Gender variance beyond a rigid binary has been forever complicated by the uneasy disparities between fantasy and the real, with the lived, embodied transgender sense of self distinct from the performative playacting of drag or the kink and roleplay of some crossdressing expressions. But how to understand these fragmentary representations of Noem and his desires are certainly not clear and may never be made so. It’s within this capacity of the unknown that a disturbing blend of bloodlust, schadenfreude, and contradiction has shaped public response—revealing, among other things, a capacity for alienation, disgust, and cruelty in a public that might otherwise characterize itself as progressive. A payback of transference appears to fuel the punitive recourse toward Noem in the public eye: his attachment to his wife’s apparent disdain for life (of immigrants, animals, fatal victims of ICE) and hard line conservative politics has attracted a hostility I’ve witnessed over and over in several months’ worth of settings where anyone else would be granted empathy for their long, unresolved journey into gender that has been marked with shame and secrecy. The response has been derisive, dismissive, and derogatory.
It is presently unknowable if Bryon Noem is a trans woman or wants to be. But what we do know is that there have been many individuals who have explored possibilities beyond what they were assigned at birth by participating in kink communities online and IRL, by doing drag, by playing around with filters on phone pics and putting on their relatives’ makeup in locked bathrooms in order to find out what they’ve been indoctrinated to believe is unthinkable. Young trans women, yet to have access and opportunity to live as they wish, have routinely sublimated understandings of their gender through playing as female characters in video games—to live inside a virtual avatar of who they wanted to be. Right now, there are people experimenting with binding their chests, ordering their first packer to be mailed to them in discreet packaging, talking to strangers online ‘as’ someone other than who they present IRL, trying on their wife’s or their sister’s dresses when they’re alone, facetuning images of themselves. And some of those people have been raised in suppressive, conservative ideological environments, and have never experienced anything like support for their curiosities or their inklings that there might be something else in who they are or what they want. There are male-bodied people afraid that being pegged (or enjoying it) makes them gay; there are people employing sex workers partly because of the overwhelming fear of rejection from their partner and family if they were to be honest about their desires; there are people who are attempting to invent temporary, provisional, experimental images of themselves as they have never been before. An inconvenient truth about fantasy is that sometimes it is a precursor to manifesting something ‘for real.’ That is also its power to change the world.
There are, of course, branching exigencies that can be examined in the Bryon Noem incident: in what ways are his expressed desires to be “trans,” to be a “bimbo” entangled in the degradation, if not outright oppression, of the populations to which those terms may refer? What are the real consequences of Noem’s actions—how did he treat the women sex workers with whom he interacted? How do the acts of deception, no matter the contents being covered up, undermine trust with his family? One’s suffering doesn’t neutralize the ways one is complicit in causing suffering.
Still, I would love for all totally unstable (and often destabilizing) efforts to realize fantasy to be able to find and receive care as their primary context. The moral panic and condemnation that earnest or even desperate makeovers draw out of an otherwise permissive progressive society is cause for serious concern. The slide from renouncing human rights violations and war crimes into nasty jabs at body mass and orange spray tans is a dangerous lapse in ethics. Spite directed at ‘Mar-a-Lago face’ rather than rape culture is misplaced and unhelpful. The closeted bimbo may live bad politics, but the bimbo longings are something else. Slayyyter gets to be “a nasty whore” if she wants to be. Gladys Nilsson’s wriggling watercolor women test the waters with innuendo and degenerance. The Bride, as portrayed by Jessie Buckley in Gyllenhaal’s film, may refuse, resist, speak her mind, and wreak havoc against a systemic misogyny that destroyed her, resurrected her, and then brought her to further ruin. Sharkie’s fuchsia misadventures are functional fictions that hopefully make real life more livable.
The world is on fire; democracy is in ruins; just as prismatic, expansive approaches to gender, sex, and sexuality crested into the mainstream, we’ve watched in horror at the ultra-conservative corrective crackdown in an effort to maintain establishment norms. The fissures and ruptures in this worst timeline are the escape routes, detours, and redirects that fantasy affords us. Arguably, the bimbo was born from the fantasies of weak and powerful men—it’s only now she has gone rogue, darting out into fantasies of her own, thereby embodying patriarchy’s more violent inhibitions and deepest nightmares. We are living in an age when the super sheroes, monstresses, avatars, and alter egos are assembling to quake the boundaries that constrain The Real. We are writhing with hot pink possibilities of something better than all of this. Act up! Turn up the volume! Sharpen your teeth and let your tongues loll; let your nipples point wherever they want to. Misbehave.