Sex With
Sex—it makes the world go around. Hot, messy, sticky, explosive. It’s private, sometimes public.
Juicy, naughty, thrilling; quietly, secretly lingering in our minds. Social, and also political.
Sex—the only thing that kept me reading Fagle’s translation of The Iliad or Aescheluys’s
Oresteia at 19 years old. The Greeks thought they were good at most things. Sex included. It was what allowed the great gods and goddesses of Olympus to interact with and influence
mortals. Zeus, all powerful and all-lusting, was tyrannical in his ruling and in his seductions.
With his charm, he had his way with dozens of goddesses, mortals, and beings in between.
The myth of Leda and the Swan is one of Zeus’s most infamous pursuits. It was famously retold
by William Butler Yeats in his poem “Leda and the Swan” and there are numerous depictions
painted by students of Leonardo di Vinci. A beautiful woman, a swan, a tangle of feathers and
limbs. Maybe the scene looks tender, maybe erotic, maybe ambiguous. But at its core is
something darker: a god descending from the sky to seduce—or rape—a mortal woman. And her silence.
In 1970, feminist theorist Kate Millett defined sexual politics as “the contestation of
power-structured relationships with respect to sex, gender, and sexuality, and in relation to the
social system of patriarchy.” That feels like a fitting lens for revisiting Leda. The myth is not
just a story about beauty and divinity—it’s about power, domination, and the erasure of female
perspective, wrapped in soft-focus feathers.
This erasure persists across centuries of artistic representations. In Leonardo da Vinci’s lost
painting of Leda and the Swan, which survives only through copies, the tone is serene. Leda
appears relaxed, gazing down at her children—hatched from giant eggs—while the swan nestles
nearby. It’s pastoral, maternal, even domestic. The violence of the myth has been brushed aside.
Similarly, Renaissance works often aestheticize the story into a kind of eroticized idyll, where
Leda’s consent is assumed, her experience unexamined.
Even in Yeats’s poem, which brings the violence to the surface—“A shudder in the loins
engenders there / The broken wall, the burning roof and tower”—the focus is still distant,
abstract, almost cold. He’s more concerned with the cosmic consequences (namely the fall of
Troy and the birth of Helen) than Leda herself. “Did she put on his knowledge with his power /
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?” Yeats asks. It’s a haunting line. But again:
speculation, not empathy.I discovered Nina Childress when I was greeted by a looming portrait of Colin de Land—a beloved art dealer of 1980s New York—in the foyer of an UES townhouse.
Before there was Nina Childress the artist, there was Nina Kuss—a punk girl in the French band
Lucrate Milk, a member of the anarchic street collective Les Frères Ripoulin, and a
self-mythologizing fixture of Paris’s 1980s underground. Now one of the most acclaimed
French painters of her generation, Childress still works like someone who doesn’t care what anyone thinks—an attitude perhaps best captured in her own description of her practice: “conceptual and dumb.”
Over the past forty years, she has refused stylistic allegiance, bouncing from abstraction to
hyperrealism, from glamorously grungy self-portraits to airbrushed celebrity facsimiles. Her
work often pulses with phosphorescent color, seductive surface, and something a little grotesque
underneath. She has painted everything from everyday objects to pop icons to introspective
self-portraits—but what recurs, again and again, is a kind of gleeful defiance. Her paintings resist
aesthetic norms, social codes, and the impulse to tidy things up. They crackle with humor,
sincerity, and provocation.
This is especially on display in her 2009 series Sex mit Schwan (Sex with Swan). Revisiting
Leda’s encounter, Childress doesn’t romanticize or soften. She makes explicit what classical art
only whispered. Her Leda—green-skinned, hair hiding her face—is both present and
unknowable. She’s locked in sexual entanglements with not one but two swans. In some frames,
she appears to be participating. In others, submissive. Her body is visible; her pleasure, not.
Her face is obscured in every image—covered by a curtain of dark hair. We can't read her
expression. We can't confirm her consent. We can only look and feel uneasy about looking.
Childress wrote on Instagram that she wanted to “show what classical paintings of Leda more or
less suggest.” And she does. Her work—bold, untamable, uninterested in prettiness—forces us to
sit with the ambiguity, the discomfort, and the violence that gets smoothed over in older
portrayals. It’s not just a revision of the myth. It’s a rejection of the idea that women’s bodies
should be sites of aestheticized suffering, passivity, or silence.
Sex and power lie in the same bed. They are inseparable. This summer, I felt it—that rare
alignment of confidence and desire, heat in my skin and power in my body. It came in a wave,
and much quicker than it came, it was gone. Maybe that’s why Childress’s Leda stays with me:
she knows what it is to be both in possession of yourself and suddenly not at all.
