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“People”‘s Sexiest Man Alive 1992. Thoughts?

So, did you catch the Season 5 premiere of True Blood on HBO last night?  I did!  Yes, I watched True Blood and then I went straight to bed without watching the Mad Men finale.  Don’t look at me like that.  I’ll watch Mad Men right after this, ok?

For the uninitiated, True Blood‘s plot is essentially “supernatural beings and normals get blood all over them and then have sex”.  I wrote that before I image-searched and found this picture, guys:

“Let’s kill/eat someone and then fuck” “…Again? Fine.”

There is some good acting on True Blood, mostly from Nelsan Ellis.  There is also some interesting allegory to the mainstream LGBT rights movement that may or may not be intentional/actually hateful.  Racial tropes and class stereotypes abound: There Are Things; there are always Things.  The Thing that I would like to focus on is that True Blood is known for not only having a cast that fucks a lot, but a cast that is widely considered by mainstream media to be the “sexiest cast on T.V.“.  The cast is super-fit, symmetrical, hot in that “Hollywood-hot” way.  Eric or Alcide?  Sookie or Jessica?  We pose these questions at parties, with other moms at the playground and while we watch with our friends.  We feel that we can have this conversation out in the open because, whoever we pick, we are safe knowing that we’re picking from socially acceptable choices: my friend might disagree if I said I think Eric is hotter than Alcide, but I wouldn’t be made to feel ashamed about it.  What if I said I was hot for bumbling Sherrif Belfour?  What if I dream about sexless waitress/mother Arlene?

Craigslist, porn genres, and the simple fact that most of us exist as products of sexual reproduction and have sex with each other all the while not looking like the cast of True Blood are all obvious pieces of evidence that who we admit to being attracted to and who we are actually attracted to are entirely different categories.  I remember knowing in Kindergarten that I shouldn’t tell anyone about the boy I had a crush on because he wasn’t one of the “cute ones” in our class.   Exponentially worse, LGBT teenagers and young adults are 2-3 times more likely to attempt suicide than are their heterosexual peers due to internalized homophobia, fear of violence, fear of permanent ostracization, inherited belief that there is something fundamentally wrong, fundamentally “bad” about their feelings of attraction.

Every weekend some college guy is made fun of for hooking up with a girl who he might have actually liked but who his friends deem “ugly” or “fat” or something else not acceptable.  He pretends to have been blacked out, tells his friends and himself that he’s not attracted to her and never was, laughs with them.  The same thing happens with groups of girls.  On the flip side, the one time I watched Millionaire Matchmaker I saw this notorious episode in which the millionaire looking for a match is a woman who is derided as “delusional” and told that she shouldn’t go for a “Matthew McConaughey type” because she’s not thin enough, reinforcing and perpetuating the bullshit about how thinness=hotness; how thinness is a necessary qualification for having sex with people who appear physically fit.

What You Really Really Want: A Smart Girl’s Guide to Sex and Safety is a great book written for girls of all sexual orientations (the author, Jacklyn Friedman, defines herself as “flexisexual”, which I think is the most perfect thing ever) and levels of sexual experience.  It’s a guide for the reader to liberate herself from all of the “shoulds” she’s absorbed from outside influence surrounding her sexual attractions, needs, and desires, and uncover what she’s actually looking for in her sex life.  Friedman writes, “It’s probably true that conventionally pretty women get more sexual attention than women whose bodies fall significantly outside the norm, because we all get trained about what we ‘should’ find attractive….There are social consequences for people who are attracted to ‘nonideal’ women, too, and many folks don’t want to pay that price, or have never considered that they could opt out of the limited system they were handed” [emphasis added] (p.90).

I don’t know about you but I when I actually think about it I’ve had a lot of sexual attractions to people that I mostly deny even to myself because of how I understand and fear social consequences.  An easy-because-it’s-commonplace example to admit to are the people who I think are really sexy but I think they have a higher social status than I do so it feels embarrassing because I think that they wouldn’t want anyone to know if they slept with me.  The harder ones to admit are attractions to people who don’t have as much social clout, people who have a reputation for something considered uncool, people who don’t fit the physical profile or gender/gender presentation that I “should” be looking for.

Changing this system of the “shoulds” of sexual attraction on a societal level is a huge task, but opting out of the system as an individual certainly helps catalyze change, if only in your small circle of friends.  Some people who opt out do it naturally and without fear, for sure.  Others need help to feel that being attracted to who they are attracted to is okay and normal and nothing to be ashamed about.  People who don’t feel safe because of their sexual identity need a lot of support and love.   I really take to heart the idea that making assumptions about others’ sexuality and sex lives, even in your own head, preserves social stigma.  Common assumptions based on stereotypes (which Friedman in her book urges the reader to confront) include, in no particular order, that fat people don’t have sex as often or as “well” as thin people, that gay men have anonymous sex all the time, that Black and Latino men are hyper-sexualized, that adults who are into comics or role-playing games or something else “nerdy” are virgins, that there has to be a “masculine one” in a lesbian couple, that large dicks are better, that “no one thinks _____” is sexy.  The list, obviously, goes on.

It’s totally okay to enjoy watching “hot” people have sex, á la True Blood.  It’s totally okay to think that “Hollywood-hot” people are sexy.  What isn’t okay is judging others for being attracted to someone deemed outside the socially acceptable level of hotness/outside the socially acceptable realm of sexual preference.  I’m working on a list of people who I’ve thought were sexy and then felt trepidation in some way about having the thought.  It’s kind of really scary and kind of really fun.  Who’s your ‘sexy’?  Who are your ‘sexies’?  Who is about to finally watch Mad Men and be done with this shit until next time?  MEEEEE!