I don’t always know what I’ll find sexy – it’s all about having the right mix of kinks and quirks and attitude. While there are some people who I can immediately identify as ‘my type‘, it’s often hard to pin down in advance what I’ll find sexy.
So when people imply there is a universal yardstick against which we measure ‘hotness’, I’m forced to question whether they even understand what makes something sexy.
A sex party with ‘only our most attractive members…’
This blog post was kicked off by an email from a sex club. One which offers ‘exclusive events’ to people on their mailing list (and, incidentally, people NOT on their mailing list, who have repeatedly asked to be unsubscribed). Their email said this:
“This is our most exclusive line of events. Only our most attractive members will be selected to attend the party. Age limitation 18-45.”
Oh. Ho ho ho. Haha. I… oh. You’re not joking. You’re actually not joking. I’ll leave the ageism to one side for now, as I know another blogger is tackling it. I want to focus here on how a complete stranger, who holds no info about me other than my email address, reckons they can decide what I find sexy.
What I find sexy
What I find hot can change from day to day. On Monday I might be obsessed with fingers and hands – watching the way they curve around a coffee cup or roll the perfect joint. The next day I may spend hours trying to shake the very specific memory of the way a certain guy moaned when he touched my cunt and found it wet. Sometimes I obsess over the idea of being crushed – banged good and hard by someone much bigger and fleshier than me – enjoying the warmth and the closeness of a tangled, sweaty fuck. Friends of mine who do nothing for me one day might have me light-headed with lust if they tell me a sexy story, or offer a hug that lasts just one heartbeat too long. Other times, men I’ve slept with before – guys I’ve mooned, drooled and masturbated over, might not give me the same feelings today.
What’s more, what I find attractive is heavily influenced by what I see: as a teenager I mostly hung out with skinny, pale emo guys. And guess what? I had a penchant for that kind of guy until well into Uni. Now I hang out with more people, and see more people online, and watch porn that includes people with different body types. And guess what? I fancy them too.
Naturally, it’s hard for me to find people attractive if I have never seen them.
So a swingers’ club or sex party planner deciding who I do and don’t find sexy, before I have even met them, is pretty astonishing. It represents a feat of telepathy for which we’d need to overhaul all our scientific knowledge to date.
Alternatively, it is just a by-product of a society that has some fucked-up views on what counts as attractive.
One of those things.
Attractiveness is not objective
A long time ago I tweeted something along the lines of ‘hotness is not objective’, and a charming gentleman took me to task. Sexiness was definitely objective, he explained, because you could poll everyone in the world about the attractiveness of a particular person, and if ‘the majority’ decided they were then that was that.
Oh how I laughed.
Attractiveness is not a measurable thing, like temperature or mass or the number of biscuits I’ve eaten this morning. At a push any statement about attractiveness may tell you something about how closely an individual matches the culturally defined beauty standard, but nothing more than that.
If you tell me ‘Ms Jones has red hair’ I have learned a new fact about Ms Jones. If you tell me ‘Ms Jones is hot’ I have learned nothing tangible about her, only something about you.
So when someone who runs a sex party tells me that ‘only the most attractive people’ can attend, I don’t learn anything about the people attending the event. I have no idea if they curve their hands around their coffee cups in a sexy way, whisper ‘good girl’ in the right tone or hold me so perfectly I can feel my pulse thud in my crotch.
What do I learn, exactly? Well, I can certainly deduce things: given that our cultural beauty standards trend towards white, slim, cis, able-bodied people, then those are the kind of people I can expect to see there. With this info, I could possibly deduce whether I’d be allowed to attend the event, or whether certain of my friends would be able to come with me.
But the most valuable thing I learn is about the event itself:
It probably won’t be much fun.
Update: I mentioned another blogger was tackling this too – check out this excellent post on excluding people from sex parties over at This D/s life.
14 Comments
I spent a few years as a sex party reviewer (Yes. Excellent job. Sadly gone now with the slow death of the sex magazine industry) and this used to piss me off back then – it’s not that new,naturally.
I never got to go to any of those ‘exclusive’/’attractive people only’ parties, even though at one stage my then-editor was cheerfully prepared to back me up if I wanted to lie about my age – I didn’t actually fancy submitting myself to the rest of their selection procedure. I was then (as I am now), a bit chubby, fairly low-maintenance in terms of hair and clothing, and I just hate the idea of being ‘rated’ like this by people I may have no interest in fucking.
So I can’t confirm this is the absolute truth, but what I heard from one or two friends over the years was that the ‘attractiveness’ standard was applied far more strictly to the women, and that a lot of the women who were there were attending because they were being paid to do so.
To be clear: I am absolutely not knocking anyone for either paying an escort or being paid for attending this sort of party – it’s the club promoter’s attitude I dislike. A room full of people who are either feeling smug and entitled or desperately insecureand grateful that they have made the grade does not give you an atmosphere that’s exciting and erotic.
As someone who has been turned down by these types of events because I’m not attractive enough I completely agree with this. I avoid the type of place that limits people on looks or age, I find they attract an elitist attitude and I find that very unattractive.
“If you tell me ‘Ms Jones is hot’ I have learned nothing tangible about her, only something about you.” I love that, never thought about it that way before and it sums it up perfectly.
This is why I draw a blank at questions like, “So what kind of guys do you usually go for?” There is no ‘usually’ – by asking that question people just categorise other people and create value systems which isn’t how sex should be looked at. I like chest hair. I like beards. But by going for a ‘type’ you just limit yourself and no one goes for all uniformity, all of the time. I just like fucking people who also like fucking me. Unfortunately not an answer you can give over an 11am tea break at work.
I bet a sex party with that kind of description would be a crap affair, as well. Forced atmosphere, intense without any opportunity to relax, no fun or giggles…rubbish.
The guy in my life is quite overweight so wouldn’t be classed as “attractive” in the eyes of this club. But he is the hottest, sexiest man I have ever been with. His eyes, the way he looks at me, the intent when he undresses me, his voice, his hands, his shoulders. How he sounds when he comes.The way he smokes a cigarette. The way he treats other people. His kindness. His wit. His brain. His greediness for me. THIS is what matters to me. And I think these individual things that make a person unique are what matter to most people.
A pretty face and nice body do literally nothing for me on their own. That’s what this club is overlooking. And sure, if you are a beautiful person and other beautiful people turn you on, then knock yourself out. Nothing wrong with that. But the 1% of model beautiful people are not the only people getting laid. By a fucking long shot. This is one of the reasons I so love your blog, Girl On The Net. You are so inclusive and you acknowledge that all kinds of people of all shapes, sizes, levels of ‘attractiveness’, physical abilities and genders are having sex. And what a wonderful thing that is.
Oh god I think this might be one of my favourite comments ever. I ADORE the way you talk about him, and I genuinely got a sexy shiver down my spine reading how you talk about him: “His kindness. His wit. His brain. His greediness for me.” THAT is sexiness. Times a million. Thank you so much xxx
<3 x
I am in the same boat as you GP. My guy is also quite big, and would probably be rejected by a fair few folk because of it. But. Holy crap. Best sex of my life. Just the way he is makes me feel…different. It’s nothing specific, just that even being in the same room as him makes me the happiest I’ve ever been. I’ve never ached to be with another person before I met him. Looks be damned, it’s how you treat other people and how you make them feel that counts.
I saw a tweet about this the other day, someone had tweeted something like “that’s ageism” or some response to a promo they put out about not accepting over 45’s. The club’s response was that they hold an evening(s) a week where the over 45 generation could attend, like it was some big achievement!
Talk about typecasting and taking choice away from people
OMG that’s so annoying. Also ‘yay we do a special evening for you’ – I do hope that at least that evening is for everyone rather than having some bizarre ‘ONLY over 45s’ versus ‘ONLY under 45s’
You’re stroppy because you’ve got small differently sized tits aren’t you? Aren’t you? You are aren’t you?
OF COURSE YOU ARE!
U wot m8
My initial reaction to this was ‘But some people *are* just hot! Everyone agrees!’, but on further thought, it’s true: there isn’t any characteristic that makes someone objectively attractive. Some people are considered more attractive by most people than others, but even when you look at people who are widely considered ‘hot’, there’s not much they’ve got in common with each other: so if hotness is an objective thing, there’s no single way of achieving it. Moreover, people’s tastes vary to a remarkable extent: there’s no one person who *everyone* finds hot, and for almost anyone there’s potentially *someone* who finds them hot.
Furthermore, even for one person, what they find attractive can change over time (as noted in the post). We aren’t very good at predicting what we will find attractive: a person can say, for example, ‘I’m only attracted to redheads’, and then suddenly find that’s not true. Even attraction to a particular gender isn’t as stable as people tend to think.
This also goes for all those dating sites that try to match people based on shared characteristics, by the way: you may *think* that you could only love someone who agrees with you on question X, or on 99 other issues, but in fact people who are completely different from one another fall in love all the time. So by limiting yourself to people with whom you’ve got a close enough ‘match’, you’re missing out on all those possibilities.
So, in short, yeah. ‘Objective’ beauty standards are bullshit. I’ve also typed the words ‘hot’ and ‘attractive’ in this comment enough that they’ve lost all meaning, but possibly they never had much of one in the first place.
And as an afterthought: if there *is* a certain characteristic which a person *always* finds attractive, and they can’t get turned on without it… well, we call that a fetish.
I couldn’t agree more! I have a very narrow definition of what I find sexy but appreciate that my definition is not a one size fits all. I’ve actually had people tell me what I find sexy is not sexy and I’m at a loss as to what they think my reaction to that should be? Do they think I’m going to say “Oh your right, I’ll just change my brain patterns to adjust to what the majority of folks find sexy” “Thank goodness you were here to save me from myself”! It’s all very silly!