Stripper shoes that host aquatic worlds within their platforms. Panty-clad booties, disembodied and floating in outer space. Alien women donning fishnets and strappy lingerie. Welcome to the world of The Cosmic Slut, an illustrator who creates “NSFW softcore artworks,” generally including a galactic twist.
Enamored with her art and eager to enter said world, I virtually sat down with The Cosmic Slut to find out more about her and her passion for astronomical asses.
Secret Space Slut
With a strong sexual concept carried out evidently throughout the entirety of her online presence—her logo is a Saturn-esque pierced breast, for crying out loud—I had expected to hear that The Cosmic Slut had been creating spacy erotic artworks from the moment she first picked up a pencil. However, Cosmic’s professional background actually has rather innocent roots.
After completing her Master’s in Animation, Cosmic became a freelance illustrator specializing in children’s books. While these types of contracts were originally what she sought out to do, Cosmic eventually found herself longing to create more adult works. She began to miss drawing mature bodies, which she took great joy in during her life drawing classes in art school. And so Cosmic started illustrating naughtier pieces to express her sexuality—ones that had to be kept far away from children’s books.
As her collection of slutty space art grew, Cosmic wanted to share them with like-minded individuals but knew they had no place next to her other illustrations. This prompted Cosmic to start a dedicated Instagram account for such graphics, and thus The Cosmic Slut was born.
Going a step further than just separating her erotic illustrations from her family-friendly ones, The Cosmic Slut operates her NSFW Instagram page with complete anonymity. This nameless, faceless operation allows her to fully explore her sexuality creatively, without the worry of judgment or repercussions in her other professional pursuits.
Sex Work Begets Sex Art
The Cosmic Slut says her largest source of inspiration is her neighborhood, which makes a lot of sense considering she lives in Amsterdam's Red Light District. Every time she goes out for groceries or walks down the street, Cosmic is greeted with the sight of barely-dressed women flaunting their bodies in display windows. This daily visual is a potent stimulus for Cosmic, further prompting her to create sexually charged artworks of “lusty aliens” on the regular.
The beginnings of her Instagram page coincided with—or perhaps were influenced by—Cosmic’s then-burgeoning interest in pole dancing and twerking as a form of exercise, another significant influence on her works. While Cosmic only participates in these activities as a fitness-focused hobby, she makes a point of mentioning that “pole culture” could not exist without strippers. An adamant supporter of sex workers, Cosmic also gleans inspiration from those in the sex industry (as well as aerial acrobats and others in the pole community) that she follows on Instagram.
The Allure of the Unknown
Missing limbs and artfully incomplete bodies are a frequent theme across Cosmic’s illustrations. As a pro-sex and womxn-centric artist, one may presume that this creative decision is symbolic of rejecting sexual objectification or taking charge of your own sexuality. (That was my original interpretation, at least.) But the disembodiment actually stems from Cosmic’s fascination with the unknown—as well as her fondness of the core, which she considers to be the sexiest part of the human body.
During her art history studies, Cosmic found herself enthralled by ancient Greek and Roman statues. What intrigued her most was not the artworks themselves but the missing limbs that had fallen off over time while the statues’ cores remained. Cosmic loved that viewers were left having to guess what the arms and legs looked like in the sculptures, and now when she draws, she “can’t help [herself] but to cut out some limbs here and there.”
This affinity for the unknown is also what piques Cosmic’s interest in outer space, which she sees as “a place of mystery and dreams.” When asked about the connection between space and eroticism, she says that the cosmos can be symbolic of unknown (or unrealized) sexual fantasies, but that The Cosmic Slut may very well be “[just] another case of an artist mixing two obsessions together.” It’s unclear which statement holds more truth, and Cosmic seems unsure of that herself. But whatever her reasoning for bringing sluts to outer space, the sluts seem happy to be there, and the cosmos happy to host them.
