What Sarah Lucas’ Self Portrait with Fried Eggs tells us is that man-spreading is cool as long as you have eggs on your boobs and you are Sarah Lucas.

There isn’t a lot that Sarah Lucas could do that is uncool, but as self portraits go, this is probably the coolest. If given a choice between a portrait like, say, John Trumbull’s Alexander Hamilton and this, I bet most people would pick the fried eggs. I mean, it’s improper, it's edgy, and there's breakfast involved.

Lucas’ style is all about challenging the societal norms that control us like puppets. This portrait specifically takes on gender stereotypes, blurring the lines between masculinity and femininity. Obviously the eggs are a funny stand-in for female body parts. Her "I give zero sh*ts" face and the pack of cigarettes on the floor beside her – a sign of recklessness – makes it so that you don’t know whether to laugh or to be intimidated. It’s almost as if she is daring you to look at her fried eggs. This stands in stark contrast to submissive women in portraits of yore.

This photograph is one one twelve self portraits by Sarah Lucas. They started when Lucas began to embrace her androgyny as a power instead of a fault. She recalled, “I suddenly could see the strength of the masculinity about it - the usefulness of it to the subject struck me at that point, and since then I've used that.” This has been a common theme in Lucas’ work since the nineties, which is probably why her popularity has never faded, and she had a retrospective open at the New Museum in September 2018.