Sexy

The lift or elevator is a notoriously awkward environment. In order to eliminate the painful experience of a populated lift there exists a certain elevator etiquette that should be observed. Lift protocol is not written in any staff, student or visitors handbook but is instead embedded into the fabric of our social structure and ingrained into our psyche much like queuing.  

I feel it necessary to remind my readers of this etiquette in order to contextualize a lift experience I had last Wednesday. There were four of us: myself and three young lads, the lift was descending and stopped to collect five teenage girls, one of whom declared to her four friends “I’m defiantly the most sexy person in this lift.” For a moment I was horrified, briefly in my flu based daydream I had imagined myself to look rather like Angelina Jolie, but alas a glance at my general downtrodden and elderly demeanor dispelled this little fantasy. The young lads to be fair weren't sexy either, though it would of course raise some questions if I thought they were, neither though were any of the five teenage girls. Clearly some of the people in that lift were younger, more vibrant, had better teeth, better skin, glossier hair, oodles of misplaced confidence, but sorry love, no one in that lift was sexy.

Sexy me? as illustrated by AndyArtisand

Morally I feel I should question the breath of that teenage girls ambition “to be sexy”, intellectually however I've been pondering the nature of sexy. I thought long and hard about who was sexy and came up with icons of a bygone age; Sophia Loren, Brigitte Bardot, Marilyn Monroe, and concluded that to be sexy one must have curves, big lips and a surname ending in ‘O’. Consider where that leaves Scarlett Johansson with two O’s. That’s me out then, the teenage girl had better curves than me and she may even have had an O in her surname.  The thing is I know, that sexy is more than that, I dug around deeper in history; Pola Negri, Theda Bara, Josephine Baker, Louise Brooks, Clara Bow: it seems the O and the curves are still quite important, but so too is an element of mystery. Me out again.

I tried a different approach, what do I find sexy? Sexy is passion, sexy is breathlessness (Marilyn Monroe), sexy is abandon, the sort of abandon that leaves your hair tousled (Brigitte Bardot), your clothing ever so slightly disheveled (Sophia Loren in some movies.) 

When it comes to men sexy means messy hair, artists and scientific genius alike are far too preoccupied for hair, for matching clothes (remember the eleventh Doctor), sexy is a bit unpredictable…I was on to something: miss-matched, preoccupied and messy hair, Then I cut my fringe, you should see it, it shows wild abandon and demonstrates how I must have been so preoccupied with higher more mysterious sexy things that my fringe can only ever be considered Sexy..too sexy for the lift at least.