Sexiness Is Not a Property of the Body

Beauty appears susceptible to description, while desire resists it. The features a culture esteems can be catalogued, their proportions compared and their prevalence statistically established, yet none of these operations explains why a particular individual should acquire an affective significance disproportionate to any demonstrable attribute. If desirability were simply the cumulative consequence of desirable properties, attraction ought to exhibit something approaching mathematical regularity. Its notorious caprice suggests that the phenomenon may reside less in the properties enumerated than in the relationship that makes their enumeration consequential.

Evolutionary psychology offers a plausible point of departure. Preferences might preserve the adaptive consequences of ancestral environments, rendering certain physical characteristics salient because they once correlated with reproductive advantage. Yet the explanatory achievement of such an account depends upon a distinction that its popular formulations frequently obscure. To establish why a preference might have evolved is not to establish why it occurs, with a particular intensity, between particular individuals. Nor does the historical utility of a disposition guarantee its present function, since ancestral utility is a clue to origins and not a forecast of any single encounter. The genealogy of desire, in other words, cannot be mistaken for its complete phenomenology.

Psychology complicates the matter by introducing a circularity into what might have seemed a causal sequence. Confidence is attractive, but confidence itself may be partly constituted by the recognition it elicits. Does self assurance produce desirability, or does anticipated approval produce the composure subsequently interpreted as self assurance? The alternatives are not necessarily exclusive, since reciprocal causation can render an initially contingent advantage progressively self reinforcing. Familiarity presents a comparable ambiguity. Repetition may dull novelty, while sustained acquaintance may disclose attributes that transform an initially indifferent perception.

The genealogy of desire, in other words, cannot be mistaken for its complete phenomenology.

Culture intervenes not merely by prescribing ideals but by organising attention. Images, institutions and conventions establish the interpretative hierarchies through which bodies acquire social meaning. Yet the conclusion that desire is culturally mediated does not entail that it is culturally manufactured in its entirety. Such reasoning would confuse the conditions under which an experience becomes intelligible with the causes sufficient to produce it. Biological reductionism mistakes recurrent patterns for exhaustive explanations, while unrestricted social constructivism risks explaining every possible response by making culture sufficiently elastic to accommodate its opposite.

Declaring attraction either objective or subjective is therefore unsatisfactory. Its variability does not render it causally unintelligible, just as its regularities do not establish a universal standard. Sexiness may emerge through the interaction of embodied dispositions, socially cultivated attention, personal history and anticipatory imagination, none of which can independently account for the resulting experience. Each factor shapes what the others can do, which is why subtracting any one of them leaves the remainder unintelligible.

The inquiry began by asking which attributes make a person desirable, yet the question may presuppose what it must explain, namely that desirability belongs exclusively to its object. Perhaps attraction is relational, arising when another person's presence encounters the observer's historically formed capacity to find meaning in it. This does not make the body irrelevant, or desire arbitrary. It makes their relationship indispensable. What makes someone sexy may therefore reveal as much about the organisation of the observer's attention as about the person who commands it, and what first formed that attention remains the part no catalogue has reached.