Dispatch #35: Sexy Things

Scattered Thoughts

I’m not sure how it happened, but my two younger children have chosen “sexy” as their favorite adjective—their favorite subject, even. My oldest is more than halfway to thirteen and the last thing he wants is to discuss anything even tangentially related to sex. Not so for my other two kids.

Ginger, eight years old and in the second grade, says, “This is what sexy people do,” before placing a carnation stem between her teeth. Her idea of sexy is yoked to the feminine cliché: crop tops, breathy voices, hips cocked, red lipstick, high heels. To be sexy is to be an object, watched by another.

“Why is she so sexy?” is a thing she asks about any woman with a tiny waist in a tight dress. If I’m wearing eyeliner, she asks, semi-appalled, “Are you trying to be sexy?”

Mickey, four and half, has picked up on her language. He often cuddles with me, sighing in pleasure. “You’re my boyfriend,” he coos, and pets my breasts. Then he adds, “You’re my sexy boyfriend. So sexy!”

Later, naked before getting on his pajamas, this sweet innocent child will thrust out his butt, spread apart his ass cheeks with his hands and say, squealing with laughter, “This is sexy. I am so sexy!”

Oh dear.

*

I’m probably to blame. I love the word myself, and I use it to mean all kinds of things. This glass of wine is really sexy. This is a sexy salad. What a sexy couch. I find every single one of my dear friends sexy—it’s a prerequisite for our friendship, in fact. If I didn’t find you sexy upon first meeting, I did as I more fully understood and delighted in your personality, your way of being in the world; I find your specificity magnetic because it’s fully itself.

(What kind of wine do you imagine is sexy? What kind of salad? What kind of couch? What kind of friend?)

*

The summer after my sophomore year of college, three of my LA friends—Christine, Diana, and Sarah—put together an event at Diana’s dad’s photography studio. For a reason I can’t remember, we called it “Travel: An Event.” On this evening, I read some nonfiction essays I’d written, Sarah played a few songs on her guitar, Diana performed a dance solo, and Christine made these big human figures out of papier-mâché.

WTF is La Generación 2000?!

For our finale, Sarah improvised on her guitar while Diana and I improvised a dance, with Christine’s photographs on a slideshow behind us. As we danced, Diana and I performed a list I’d written called “Sexy Things.” If I recall, there was some sexual innuendo, but it also included stuff like dancing at the club, the smell of garlic on one’s fingers, swimming in the ocean.

I am blushing, imagining us, these young women, performing for our friends and family without embarrassment. What chutzpah! Then again, our lack of self-consciousness, our confidence seems sort of sexy.

*

Sexiness is not related to sex, per se, though of course it can be; the sex aspect, though, feels beside the point. To me, sexy is something or someone that’s fully inhabited, an outward expression that hints at an internal power or knowledge.

Once, a mutual friend said Patrick was “objectively sexy.” I’m laughing even now because I can imagine a few of you reading this and agreeing…and then there are others among you who are thinking, “WHAT?! PATRICK?! SEXY?!”

Don’t get me wrong, my friend’s assessment made me quite proud, and I personally think my husband is sexy, but the memory still makes me laugh. How ridiculous! Nothing and no one is objectively sexy. Sexy is subjective. Its very subjectiveness is sexy.

The world wants to attach sexiness to a limited idea of beauty, which is how an eight-year-old comes to understand that sexy is synonymous with a young, thin (but curvy!) woman in a skimpy dress, or some muscular dude climbing off a motorcycle. And that certainly can be sexy, but not by default, and not only. Sexy won’t be contained. Our ideas of sexy are idiosyncratic, unplanned, off script.

*

Patrick and I have been at house parties with women who are “sexy dancing” and it’s, well, it’s the unsexiest sight. A “sexy dance” is one where the dancer is aware of the audience and doing preconceived “sexy moves,” a physical idiom that is dictated rather than felt, the choreography leading the body, rather than the body leading the choreography. There’s no agency in it, only a desire to be objectified—a self-conscious desperation to be. When someone is a sexy dancer (versus a “sexy” dancer), the music is theirs, their body is theirs, and if you’re there to witness that, lucky you.

The other day in dance class, my teacher said that good dancers can bend time; by moving more slowly than the music, the music actually feels slower to the audience. That is sexy.

*

When I was getting my author photo taken for my second book, I told the photographer, my (devastatingly sexy) friend’s husband, that I wanted to look “brilliant and sexy.” I didn’t explain what I meant by that because I thought it was self-evident. Apparently not, because when I arrived he asked if I had brought a tank top.

“A tank top?” I asked, puzzled.

“You said you wanted to look sexy,” he replied.

To my friend’s husband, a bare shoulder is sexy. What I meant by sexy was: confident, bold, I’ve-got-a-secret eye twinkle, a take-it-or-leave-it-here-I-am-and-here-is-my-book vibe. Yes, I wanted a vibe. A tank top is not a vibe. Me in a tank top? Not sexy.

*

I tell Ginger my sexy philosophy. I say that a kid can’t be sexy but that when she’s older she might want to tap into the feeling. That she might be surprised by what she finds sexy. I tell her sexy is a state of mind, a state of being. Sexy can be pretty but it doesn’t have to be. It’s not surface.

My daughter’s only eight years old and she’s already begun to say, “I don’t like my face,” and after my heart crumbles into dust I say something like, “Oh but I like your face. I love it, because it’s yours.”

She is already seeing herself from outside herself, as girls learn to do, assessing rather than possessing. How do I help her practice self-possession?

*

At eight years old, Ginger loves “Mean Girls,” both the original and the movie musical reboot. She and Mickey, no surprise, love the Sexy song, where ditzy mean girl Karen sings about different sexy Halloween costumes, from sexy corn to sexy Joan of Arc. (It reminds me of graduate school, when my friend Madeline and I joked about dressing as a sexy suicide bomber and a sexy Terry Schiavo to the Workshop’s Halloween party…)

In the movie, Karen’s wearing a little dress/lingerie thing and her big perky breasts are OUT. Mickey watched it, saying, “Look at her boobs!” and then Ginger admonished him, but she was also rapt.

There’s a wonderful moment during the song when Karen’s character says “Dance break,” and she and a Halloween party ensemble bust out a perfect little dance routine. At one point, Karen bounces her breasts and looks down at them in wonder and delight—and pure surprise. Like, Wow, look at my huge breasts! I had no idea what I could do with them, I didn’t realize what I was capable of!

The entire song is a knowing wink. We, the viewer, get that sexualizing Eleanor Roosevelt is not a path to female empowerment. By pushing the absurdity, every typical way that young women practice at being overtly sexy also becomes a ridiculous costume.

But it also turns it into play. And play is, in some ways, liberation.

These big boobs are mine to wield.

*

You might say, “This is too young to watch this movie, Edan!” And to that I say, Eight is not too young to interrogate signs, especially if they’re already being shoved in your face anyway, and making you reject said face.

*

I hike my pajama pants to my ribs so I have a giant camel toe and I thrust my hips forward and I ask my kids, “Aren’t I so sexy?” They’re totally repulsed by me, which is my intention. Through play, I hope they might understand that the established notions of sexy are to be toyed with. It’s my body, and I can make it into a joke that only I can tell.

*

I listened to Madonna practically from toddlerhood, lipsynched all her songs, analyzed all her videos, pored over the CD copy. In Mary Gabriel’s biography of Madonna, there is much made of the pop star’s sex appeal. She was magnetic. She was conventionally attractive, but that doesn’t matter, attractiveness doesn’t make a superstar. Madonna wouldn’t allow record executives to dictate how she used her pretty face, her cute bod. She was in control of her image, and she exuded not only beauty but something else more complicated and slippery, something closer to art in her ability to offer her sexiness, but cheekily. There was a self-awareness to young Madonna: she was and was not the person you were seeing before you.

I want to think I absorbed some of those lessons.

*

A couple of weeks ago, I saw a comedic performance called Vanessa 5000—if you’re in LA, please: go.

All I knew beforehand was that performer Courtney Pauroso was a trained clown (“Not the honk-honk kind,” said my deeply sexy friend who brought me), and that this was “A Sex Clown” show.

In case you get to see it, I won’t say much except that Vanesssa 5000 is a sex robot and the conceit is that we’re witnessing her demonstration at some kind of tech conference.

I loved so much about this show, including how Pauroso uses her conventionally attractive looks and body to point out how we objectify and dehumanize women. As Vanessa 5000, she’s wearing a thong pleather bikini that shows off her her great ass (and this means a lot coming from moi, America’s Preeminent Butt Critic). She’s wearing a ridiculous platinum blonde wig and doll-like make-up, and her AI voice is perfectly uncanny as she describes her various usable, dishwasher safe orifices. The “sexy” act is so ratcheted up it makes a mockery of heterosexual male desire, of heterosexual male desire spit back by the algorithm. Vanessa 5000 is continually destabilizing our understanding of sexiness and it feels…dangerous.

The show is partly about what humanity gives up for technology and it’s also about how AI is trying to become more human. It made me think about how we want our sex robots to be more life-like…and our women more robotic.

Vanessa 5000, programmed to be sexy, is anything but. Courtney Pauroso, the clown who performs Vanessa 5000, her body an instrument of interrogation? She’s maybe the sexiest person alive.

*

My wonderfully sexy friend Diana, who performed the “Sexy Things” dance with me at Travel: An Event, sent me the photo of our flyer. She also sent these photos of three of the four of us, from that same summer.

The year 2000, Los Angeles, California—

Look at us. We’re so young. We’re funny. We’re free.

Maybe we’re sexy, too, though we weren’t thinking of that as the camera’s aperture opened.