What sexy is: 30 things

My kids hear and read the word "sexy" a lot. Kids at school use it (already). It's on the cover of most magazines that flank the check out lines. They couldn't help, at their young ages, to ask Jude and I what the word means.

I uncomfortably explained that, technically, "sexy" refers to someone being so good-looking that they make you want to have sex with them. I was frank because I wanted them to know how inappropriate an expression it was for kids to be using. Then I added that the word has come to be used as a less specific compliment of attractiveness; people refer to cars as sexy but that doesn't mean they want to have sex with cars. (Okay, not including this guy.)

After I ignored my anguish over my children's dissipating innocence (which really could be a whole topic in itself), it got me thinking about what I consider to be sexy, or, put another way: attractive or pleasurable in a highly palpable way. 

I don't think I use the word "sexy" much. There are more expressive and useful words. I think that's a part of the reason why I flinched when my kids brought it up. Though I don't possess a particularly large vocabulary, I do prefer many words over "sexy" and consider it to be a bit of an unsophisticated compliment to be called such.  It IS something you'd expect to see on a magazine cover.  It's something you'd expect a teenage boy to say. It's okay once in a while from a husband who habitually uses more colourful and stirring language, but you know what's sexy? SYNONYMS.

Synonyms I will teach to my children, eventually, so that when they grow up they can be classy stalkers:

• fetching
• arousing
• captivating
• alluring
• provocative
• titilating
• seductive

And of course, some of these adjectives could apply to cars, food, music, art, as well as people.

So. My list of things I find "sexy"? (Or, fetching, alluring, seductive, captivating?)

1. Knowledge, especially that which vaunteth not itself.
2. Humour.
3. Experience. 
4. Soft, white cotton dress shirts, untucked and a little bit rumpled.
5. When women don't feel need to wear make-up everywhere.
6. When men can tie a tie so that there's a perfect dimple in the centre and the knot is big enough to fill the space in the collar of the shirt.
7. Birkenstocks. Go figure.
8. The smell of perfume-less skin.
9. Jazz and lounge music.
10. Well-worn jeans that are not too tight and don't flare out at the bottom.
11. Warm eyes.
12. Crow's feet.
13. Self-confidence.
14. A hearty, easy laugh.
15. Non-manicured hands. Short nails. And (you're going to think this is really weird) when the veins are a little bit raised. I think because I associate this with my aunts' hands and I always loved to look at their hands and it's a sign of age which is a sign of experience.  A sign of worker's hands.
16. Jude's shoulder muscles.
17. People who truly adore their children. Like, when you watch them watching their children and their faces just glow with mad, crazy love.
18. The smell of garlic and onions cooking. Heady.
19. Emotion shared freely.
20. Punctuation used properly. I love me a hyphen and an s-apostraphe: s'.
21. Modern decor. White walls with great art. Clean spaces. It just occurred to me that I think this is because I like room for me to be and think. I don't like to have a mood pushed onto me. A space that's just enough, with nothing extraneous, excites me. It promises peace of mind and clarity of thought and I quite like those feelings.
22. My iMac. The iPhone. Things that are sleek and yet highly functional.
23. (Jude told me to change this one. "Too weird," he said. LOL. Okay.)
24. Shadowy photography.
25. The scream of a head of cabbage when I stab it.
26. A good rainstorm.
27. Crisp, Fall air and walks in the leaves.
28. Hair you can run your hands through, without a bunch of hairspray or mouse or gel.
29. Nice earlobes, unattached.
30. Tom Waits and Leonard Cohen's music.
31. Freckles. Á la Julianne Nicholson. [Ahem.] (That's two links.)

Yes, I was kidding about the cabbage, silly. It just popped into my head and I had to write it down. (So, it didn't really count, which made room for Julianne Nicholson.)

Care to venture your own items of appreciation?

Daily Gratitudes

1. Jude went to the store tonight to buy me candy, brought it to me right away, then went to the gym. Even though he normally would tell me to eat something healthier because he knows I don't want an enabler as a husband. Just this once, he didn't tsk. He just replied to my mumble of a musing with, "What kind?" So, then I ended up consuming 400 nutritionless calories at 10pm. Dumb move.
2. My hair grows fast.
3. Jude took the little girls to his office for the afternoon. Ahhhhhhh.
4. He also made chicken burgers for supper and the mayo with the basil from a tube was delish.
5. A good babysitter I can trust.

Comments

[Michael Dundas]

Great post Natasha. I love reading posts like this one. Have a good day.
-mike

[MetroDad]

Wow. Your list almost exactly matches my own (except for the Birkenstocks.) That was a joke, right?

[Katherine]

-Cleft chins
-Doing anything with passion (singing, writing, photographing things, cooking, fighting, playing sports)
-Girls on those cruiser style bikes
-Various Jeff Buckley songs

[Katherine]

And the cackling of a fire burning in a fireplace, the real kind, not the gas ones or what have you.

[JulesD]

"classy stalkers" LOL!!

-the smell of homemade chocolate chips baking.
-my husband on his motorbike with his jeans and a t-shirt on. *sigh*
-my husband washing the dishes and folding laundry (can you say "foreplay"? -- Totally a turn on.)
-all three of my kids giggling together at the same time.

[Susan]

Man that smells of line dried shirt, sawdust, fresh air and leather.

[JulesD]

I meant chocolate chip cookies, not 'chips". Ooops. Apparently caught up in the moment. :-)

[JQ]

Teenaged boys say "hawt." How about the smell of a government office building? Or stopping the itty-bitty contractors in their tracks by proving a ladder will not actually be necessary? Or driving a standard transmission really well -- backwards?

[Sam]

#21 - Clean Spaces. There is something very powerful about our environment. I like the way you described the effect. It's the peace of mind and clarity part that I liked. Those things are so precious and yet so hard to come by (thus the precious part, I guess). I'm not sure I would have included this in my own list of sexy things. But, now that I think about it, peace of mind is a pre-requisite to most sensual experiences.

The other day I was having one of those rare peaceful mornings and noticed the sun on the grass as I walked into the office. Typically, pent-up stress blocks that sort of thing out for me. So, yeah, I see it now. Peace of mind lets us focus on the here and now and that is, well, fetching ;-)

Thanks for the post.

[Sam, the Nanti-SARRMM]

A guy having sexual relations with cars... Part of me wonders how, and another part of me has just died.

[Amber]

A kiss on the forehead.
Thunderstorms.
Handy-ness....as in those guys who seem to have some innate sense of how to built, repair, maintain or improve just about anything.

[Heather]

I have that kind of hands! I've never really liked them but you just made me feel so much better about them. Thank you!

I find a man with his shirt sleves rolled up (and dishsoapy hands) incredibly attractive. Also when someone perfectly describes someting I've felt or experineced better than I ever could and I understand myself better because of it.

[September 10th]

What a great list! I love that everybody's list of what they find sexy/appealing/alluring/etc differs too.

Like Birkenstocks don't make my list, for example. But seeing dirt under my husband's fingernails after he's been gardening totally does =)

[September 10th]

Um. Yeah. About this September 10th thing. It's just a blog I use to store my list of links until I figure out how to create one on my main blog. I don't even know how it showed up here...

My URL is actually http://www.becomingsarah.com

[Natasha]

LOL. Okay. I've seen your URL around. I would notice it, of course, because it's similar to mine.  Will check out.

Dirt under fingernails totally doesn't do it for me. ;-)

[JulesD]

Oh, Oh, Oh! I thought of another one...

Being surrounded by old books. Their smell... their beauty... their knowledge (however out of date) within. *sigh* That is a calming and centering place for me.

I like this post!

[stephanie]

i like the hands thing too, the raised veins.

[Jeff Shattuck]

I am wondering about 25. "The scream of a head of cabbage when I stab it." I feel like I need more details...

[Dani]

Re: #15. I used to date a guy who would lose his mind when the vein in my arm was raised. I mean, lose-his-mind-in-an-I-must-have-you-now kind of way. It was cute. Dare I say...sexy? :)