Our tastes are evolving.
I ate lunch alone this afternoon and took the time to read the latest copy of a supermarket tell-all magazine I found under the bench I was using as my dining room. In it there was a very large woman in a small bathing suit screaming a pop song or bellowing from the two dozen tacos she ate before the picture was snapped. Either way it was quite the image.
On the proceeding pages there was an article on the sexiest women of the 21st. century…was there a connection? I pressed ahead.
Beauty in the eye of the beholder has been a cliche since cliches weren’t yet cliches. But really what does that mean? For an African dentist and for a Norwegian fisherman, for a French skier and a Brazilian accountant, sexy means something far different.
Some think beauty comes from the inside while sexy is on the outside. Sexy like pornography can best be described as, “I’ll know it when I see it”.
In thinking about sexy, we refer to our old friend Webster and he says “ exciting appealing, attractive”, then says “exciting” again. (Maybe Mr. W was lonely!)
Sexy in Brazil, and probably everywhere else.
Here lies the rub. One person’s floor is certainly another’s ceiling. But where to begin?
Let’s start with culture. As different as each culture may be, ’sexy’ is certainly a part of that culture. We in this country think skinny, gaunt with a sour runway face is sexy (some of us); in the East that is pitiful. Someone in China seeing that would feel sorry for the woman. She is so poverty stricken she hasn’t enough to eat. In the middle East, skinny is also a ‘not good’. Hefty women are the sexy ones.
We Americans agreed up until about 40 years ago. If you can remember a Greta Garbo film, Ms. G was hefty — beautiful, yes, but with some real meat on those bones. Mae West was sexy to die for, but no one would mistake her for Twiggy!
On the topic of sexy, Lenny Bruce always said that he thought women in skin tight super short skirts, and tight revealing tops showing too much cleavage were really sexy…but he added “my girlfriend, ok, but I wouldn’t want my wife to dress that way!”
Hugh Hefner thought young blonde girls (young women) wearing low cut bathing suits, bunny ears and tails were sexy. In France women are sexy who shave neither the legs nor under arms. Here, not so much.
Big and Beautiful women once looked upon as fat, are now (thank goodness) models and fashion icons.
Women are sexy who think they’re sexy. Confident, assertive women who feel good about themselves and appear that way to the rest of us are SEXY!
Now as we continue down this road of objectifying women, let’s take another look at sexy…older women. Now it’s sexy to be over 60 and still look good. I am not talking about having ”work done”. I’m talking about wearing your natural hair color, about wearing clothes that look good on your 65 year old body, and being in shape through exercise and right diet…the healthy woman is the new sexy woman.
In the future, please let us define sexy as a positive, not a sleazy thing. As an expression of who you are. We all know someone who would never make the A-list, but still they are sexy as all get out.
As a final thought, looking back over this article I think you can substitute the word “Man” for Woman, and still find a good argument. I think it’s important that we do just that…after all, isn’t it fun objectifying both genders rather than simply one or the other?
